Elton John me Official Autobiography

ME

ELTON JOHN

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Table of Contents
About the Author

Copyright Page

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This book is dedicated to my husband, David,
and to our beautiful sons Zachary and Elijah.
Special thanks to Alexis Petridis, without
whom this book would not have been possible.

prologue

I was onstage at the Latino club in South Shields when I realized I couldn’t
take it anymore. It was one of those supper clubs that were all over Britain in
the sixties and seventies, all virtually identical: people dressed in suits, seated
at tables, eating chicken in a basket and drinking wine out of bottles covered
in wicker; fringed lampshades and flock wallpaper; cabaret and a compere in
a bow tie. It felt like a throwback to another era. Outside, it was the winter of
1967, and rock music was shifting and changing so fast that it made my head
spin just thinking about it: The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and The
Mothers of Invention, The Who Sell Out and Axis: Bold As Love, Dr John and
John Wesley Harding. Inside the Latino, the only way you could tell the
Swinging Sixties had happened at all was because I was wearing a kaftan and
some bells on a chain around my neck. They didn’t really suit me. I looked
like a finalist in a competition to find Britain’s least convincing flower child.
The kaftan and the bells were Long John Baldry’s idea. I was the organ
player in his backing band, Bluesology. John had spotted all the other r’n’b
bands going psychedelic: one week you’d go and see Zoot Money’s Big Roll
Band playing James Brown songs, the next you’d find they were calling
themselves Dantalian’s Chariot, wearing white robes onstage and singing
about how World War Three was going to kill all the flowers. He’d decided
we should follow suit, sartorially at least. So we all got kaftans. Cheaper ones
for the backing musicians, while John’s were specially made at Take Six in
Carnaby Street. Or at least, he thought they were specially made, until we
played a gig and he saw someone in the audience wearing exactly the same
kaftan as him. He stopped in the middle of a song and started shouting

angrily at him — ‘Where did you get that shirt? That’s my shirt!’ This, I felt,
rather ran contrary to the kaftan’s associations with peace and love and
universal brotherhood.

I adored Long John Baldry. He was absolutely hilarious, deeply eccentric,
outrageously gay and a fabulous musician, maybe the greatest 12-string
guitarist the UK has ever produced. He’d been one of the major figures in the
British blues boom of the early sixties, playing with Alexis Korner and Cyril
Davies and The Rolling Stones. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the
blues. Just being around him was an education: he introduced me to so much
music I’d never heard before.

But more than that, he was an incredibly kind, generous man. He had a
knack of spotting something in musicians before anybody else could see it,
then nurturing them, taking the time to build their confidence. He did it with
me, and before that he’d done it with Rod Stewart, who’d been one of the
singers in Steampacket, John’s previous band: Rod, John, Julie Driscoll,
Brian Auger. They were incredible, but then they split up. The story I heard
was that one night after a gig in St-Tropez, Rod and Julie had an argument,
Julie threw red wine over Rod’s white suit-I’m sure you can imagine how
well that went down — and that was the end of Steampacket. So Bluesology
had got the gig as John’s backing band instead, playing hip soul clubs and
blues cellars all over the country.

It was great fun, even if John had some peculiar ideas about music. We
played the most bizarre sets. We’d start out doing really hard-driving blues:
‘Times Getting Tougher Than Tough’, ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’. The
audience would be in the palm of our hand, but then John would insist we
played ‘The Threshing Machine’, a sort of smutty West Country novelty
song, the kind of thing rugby players sing when they’re pissed, like ‘’ Twas
On The Good Ship Venus’ or ‘Eskimo Nell’. John would even sing it in an
ooh-arr accent. And after that, he’d want us to perform something from the
Great American Songbook — ‘It Was A Very Good Year’ or ‘Ev’ry Time We
Say Goodbye’ — which enabled him to do his impersonation of Della Reese,
the American jazz singer. I don’t know where he got the idea that people
wanted to hear him playing ‘The Threshing Machine’ or doing an
impersonation of Della Reese, but, bless him, he remained absolutely

convinced that they did, in the face of some pretty compelling evidence to the
contrary. You’d look out at the front row, people who’d come to hear blues
legend Long John Baldry, and just see a line of mods, all chewing gum and
Staring at us in complete horror: What the fuck is this guy doing? It was
hilarious, even if I was asking myself the same question.

And then, catastrophe struck: Long John Baldry had a huge hit single.
Obviously, this would usually have been the cause of great rejoicing, but ‘Let
The Heartaches Begin’ was an appalling record, a syrupy, middle-of-the-
road, Housewives’ Choice ballad. It was a million miles from the kind of
music John should have been making, and it was Number One for weeks,
never off the radio. I’d say I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I knew
exactly what he was thinking, and I couldn’t really blame him. He’d been
slogging around for years and this was the first time he’d made any money.
The blues cellars stopped booking us and we started playing the supper clubs,
which paid better. Often we’d play two a night. They weren’t interested in
John’s pivotal role in the British blues boom or his mastery of the 12-string
guitar. They just wanted to see someone who’d been on television.
Occasionally, I got the feeling they weren’t that interested in music, full stop.
In some clubs, if you played over your allotted time, they’d simply close the
curtains on you, mid-song. On the plus side, at least the supper club
audiences enjoyed ‘The Threshing Machine’ more than the mods did.

There was one other major problem with ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’:
Bluesology couldn’t play it live. I don’t mean we refused to play it. I mean
we literally couldn’t play it. The single had an orchestra and a female chorus
on it: it sounded like Mantovani. We were an eight-piece rhythm and blues
band with a horn section. There was no way we could reproduce the sound.
So John came up with the idea of putting the backing track on tape. When the
big moment came, he’d drag a huge Revox tape machine onstage, press play
and sing along to that. The rest of us would just have to stand there, doing
nothing. In our kaftans and bells. While people ate chicken and chips. It was
excruciating.

In fact, the only entertaining thing about the live performance of ‘Let The
Heartaches Begin’ was that, whenever John sang it, women started
screaming. Apparently overwhelmed by desire, they’d temporarily abandon

their chicken and chips and run to the front of the stage. Then they’d start
grabbing at the cord of John’s microphone, trying to pull him towards them.
I’m sure this kind of thing happened to Tom Jones every night and he took it
in his stride, but Long John Baldry wasn’t Tom Jones. Rather than bask in the
adulation, he’d get absolutely furious. He’d stop singing and bellow at them
like a schoolmaster: ‘IF YOU BREAK MY MICROPHONE, YOU’LL PAY
ME FIFTY POUNDS!’ One night, this dire warning went unheeded. As they
kept pulling at the cord, I saw John raise his arm. Then a terrible thud shook
the speakers. I realized, with a sinking feeling, that it was the sound of a lust-
racked fan being smacked over her head with a microphone. In retrospect, it
was a miracle he didn’t get arrested or sued for assault. So that was the main
source of amusement for the rest of us during ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’:
wondering if tonight would be the night John clobbered one of his screaming
admirers again.

It was the song that was playing when I had my sudden moment of clarity
in South Shields. Ever since I was a kid, I’d dreamed of being a musician.
Those dreams had taken many forms: sometimes I was Little Richard,
sometimes Jerry Lee Lewis, sometimes Ray Charles. But whatever form they
had taken, none of them had involved standing onstage in a supper club
outside of Newcastle, not playing a Vox Continental organ, while Long John
Baldry alternately crooned to the accompaniment of a tape recorder and
angrily threatened to fine members of the audience fifty pounds. And yet,
here I was. Much as I loved John, I had to do something else.

The thing was, I wasn’t exactly swimming in other options. I didn’t have
a Clue what I wanted to do, or even what I could do. I knew I could sing and
play piano, but I clearly wasn’t pop star material. For one thing, I didn’t look
like a pop star, as evidenced by my inability to carry off a kaftan. For
another, I was called Reg Dwight. That’s not a pop star’s name. “Tonight on
Top of the Pops, the new single by ... Reg Dwight!’ It obviously wasn’t
going to happen. The other members of Bluesology, they had the kind of
names you could imagine being announced on Top of the Pops. Stuart
Brown. Pete Gavin. Elton Dean. Elton Dean! Even the sax player sounded
more like a pop star than me, and he had absolutely no desire to be one: he
was a serious jazz buff, killing time with Bluesology until he could start

honking away in some free improvisational quintet.

Of course I could change my name, but what was the point? After all, not
only did I think I wasn’t pop star material, I’d literally been told I wasn’t pop
star material. A few months before, I’d auditioned for Liberty Records. They
had put an advert in the New Musical Express: LIBERTY RECORDS
WANTS TALENT. But, as it turned out, not my talent. I’d gone to see a guy
there called Ray Williams, played for him, even recorded a couple of songs in
a little studio. Ray thought I had potential, but no one else at the label did:
thanks but no thanks. So that was that.

In fact, I had precisely one other option. When I’d auditioned for Liberty,
I’d told Ray that I could write songs, or at least half write songs. I could write
music and melodies, but not lyrics. I’d tried in Bluesology and the results
could still cause me to wake up at night in a cold sweat: ‘We could be such a
happy pair, and I promise to do my share’. Almost as an afterthought, or a
consolation prize after rejecting me, Ray had handed me an envelope.
Someone responding to the same advert had sent in some lyrics. I had a
feeling Ray hadn’t actually read any of them before he passed them on to me.

The guy who wrote them came from Owmby-by-Spital in Lincolnshire,
hardly the pulsating rock and roll capital of the world. He apparently worked
on a chicken farm, carting dead birds around in a wheelbarrow. But his lyrics
were pretty good. Esoteric, a bit Tolkien-influenced, not unlike ‘A Whiter
Shade Of Pale’ by Procol Harum. Crucially, none of them made me want to
rip my own head off with embarrassment, which meant they were a vast
improvement on anything I’d come up with.

What’s more, I found I could write music to them, and I could write it
really fast. Something about them just seemed to click with me. And
something about him just seemed to click with me, too. He came down to
London, we went for a coffee and we hit it off straight away. It turned out
that Bernie Taupin wasn’t a country bumpkin at all. He was extremely
sophisticated for a seventeen-year-old: long-haired, very handsome, very well
read, a huge Bob Dylan fan. So we’d started writing songs together, or rather,
not together. He would send me the lyrics from Lincolnshire, I’d write the
music at home, in my mum and stepdad’s flat in Northwood Hills. We’d
come up with dozens of songs that way. Admittedly, we hadn’t actually

managed to get any other artists to buy the bloody things yet, and if we
committed to it full-time, we’d be broke. But other than money, what did we
have to lose? A wheelbarrow full of dead chickens and ‘Let The Heartaches
Begin’ twice a night, respectively.

I told John and Bluesology I was leaving after a gig in Scotland, in
December. It was fine, no hard feelings: like I said, John was an incredibly
generous man. On the flight home, I decided I should change my name after
all. For some reason, I remember thinking I had to come up with something
else really quickly. I suppose it was all symbolic of a clean break and a fresh
start: no more Bluesology, no more Reg Dwight. As I was in a hurry, I settled
for pinching other people’s names. Elton from Elton Dean, John from Long
John Baldry. Elton John. Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Songwriting duo
Elton John and Bernie Taupin. I thought it sounded good. Unusual. Striking. I
announced my decision to my now ex-bandmates on the bus back from
Heathrow. They all fell about laughing, then wished me the best of luck.

one

It was my mum who introduced me to Elvis Presley. Every Friday, after
work, she would pick up her wages, stop off on the way home at Siever’s, an
electrical store that also sold records, and buy a new 78. It was my favourite
time of the week, waiting at home to see what she would bring back. She
loved going out dancing, so she liked big band music — Billy May and His
Orchestra, Ted Heath — and she loved American vocalists: Johnnie Ray,
Frankie Laine, Nat King Cole, Guy Mitchell singing ‘she wears red feathers
and a huly-huly skirt’. But one Friday she came home with something else.
She told me she’d never heard anything like it before, but it was so fantastic
she had to buy it. As soon as she said the words Elvis Presley, I recognized
them. The previous weekend I’d been looking through the magazines in the
local barber shop while I was waiting to have my hair cut, when I came
across a photo of the most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything
about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the way he was
standing. Compared to the people you could see outside the barber shop
window in the north-west London suburb of Pinner, he might as well have
been bright green with antennae sticking out of his forehead. I’d been so
transfixed I hadn’t even bothered to read the accompanying article, and by
the time I got home I’d forgotten his name. But that was it: Elvis Presley.

As soon as Mum put the record on, it became apparent that Elvis Presley
sounded the way he looked, like he came from another planet. Compared to
the stuff my parents normally listened to, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ barely qualified
as music at all, an opinion my father would continue to expound upon at great
length over the coming years. I’d already heard rock and roll — ‘Rock Around

The Clock’ had been a big hit earlier in 1956 — but ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ didn’t
sound anything like that either. It was raw and sparse and slow and eerie.
Everything was drenched in this weird echo. You could barely understand a
word he was singing: I got that his baby had left him, after that I completely
lost the thread. What was a ‘dess clurk’? Who was this ‘Bidder Sir Lonely’
he kept mentioning?

It didn’t matter what he was saying, because something almost physical
happened while he was singing. You could literally feel this strange energy
he was giving off, like it was contagious, like it was coming out of the
radiogram speaker straight into your body. I already thought of myself as
music mad — I even had a little collection of my own 78s, paid for with record
tokens and postal orders I got on birthdays and at Christmas. Until that
moment, my hero had been Winifred Atwell, a big, immensely jolly
Trinidadian lady who performed onstage with two pianos — a baby grand on
which she played light classical and a battered old upright for ragtime and
pub songs. I loved her sense of glee, the slightly camp way she would
announce, ‘And now, I’m going to my other piano’; the way she would lean
back and look at the audience with a huge grin on her face while she was
playing, like she was having the best time in the world. I thought Winifred
Atwell was fabulous, but I’d never experienced anything like this while
listening to her. I'd never experienced anything like this in my life. As
‘Heartbreak Hotel’ played, it felt like something had changed, that nothing
could really be the same again. As it turned out, something had, and nothing
was.

And thank God, because the world needed changing. I grew up in fifties
Britain and, before Elvis, before rock and roll, fifties Britain was a pretty
grim place. I didn’t mind living in Pinner — I’ve never been one of those rock
stars who was motivated by a burning desire to escape the suburbs, I quite
liked it there — but the whole country was in a bad place. It was furtive and
fearful and judgemental. It was a world of people peeping around their
curtains with sour expressions, of girls being sent away because they’d Got
Into Trouble. When I think of fifties Britain, I think of sitting on the stairs of
our house, listening to my mum’s brother, Uncle Reg, trying to talk her out of
getting divorced from my dad: ‘You can’t get divorced! What will people

think?’ At one point, I distinctly remember him using the phrase ‘what will
the neighbours say?’ It wasn’t Uncle Reg’s fault. That was just the mindset of
the times: that happiness was somehow less important than keeping up
appearances.

The truth is that my parents should never have got married in the first
place. I was born in 1947, but I was effectively a war baby. I must have been
conceived while my father was on leave from the RAF — he had joined up in
1942 at the height of World War Two and elected to stay on after the war
ended. And my parents were definitely a war couple. Their story sounds
romantic. They met the same year my dad joined up. He was seventeen, and
had worked in a boatbuilding yard in Rickmansworth that specialized in
making narrowboats for canals. Mum was sixteen, her maiden name was
Harris, and she delivered milk for United Dairies on a horse and cart, the kind
of job a woman would never have done before the war. My dad was a keen
amateur trumpet player, and while he was on leave, he apparently spotted my
mum in the audience while he was sitting in with a band playing at a North
Harrow hotel.

But the reality of Stanley and Sheila Dwight’s marriage wasn’t romantic
at all. They just didn’t get on. They were both stubborn and short-tempered,
two delightful characteristics that it’s been my huge good fortune to inherit.
I’m not sure if they ever really loved each other. People rushed into marriage
during the war — the future was uncertain, even by the time of my parents’
wedding in January 1945, and you had to seize the moment — so maybe that
had something to do with it. Perhaps they had loved each other once, or at
least thought they had, in the time they snatched together. Now they didn’t
even seem to like each other. The rows were endless.

At least they subsided when my dad was away, which he often was. He
was promoted to flight lieutenant, and was regularly posted abroad, to Iraq
and Aden, so I grew up in a house that seemed to be filled with women. We
lived with my maternal grandmother, Ivy, at 55 Pinner Hill Road — the same
house I was born in. It was the kind of council house that had sprung up all
over Britain in the twenties and thirties: three bedrooms, semi-detached, red
brick on the ground floor and white-painted render on the top floor. The
house actually had another male occupant, although you wouldn’t really have

noticed. My grandfather had died very young, of cancer, and Nan had
remarried, to a guy called Horace Sewell, who’d lost a leg in World War
One. Horace had a heart of gold, but he wasn’t what you would call one of
life’s big talkers. He seemed to spend most of his time outside. He worked at
the local nursery, Woodman’s, and when he wasn’t there, he was in the
garden, where he grew all our vegetables and cut flowers.

Perhaps he was just in the garden to avoid my mother, in which case I
couldn’t really blame him. Even when Dad wasn’t around, Mum had a
terrible temper. When I think back to my childhood, I think of Mum’s moods:
awful, glowering, miserable silences that descended on the house without
warning, during which you walked on eggshells and picked your words very
carefully, in case you set her off and got thumped as a result. When she was
happy she could be warm and charming and vivacious, but she always
seemed to be looking for a reason not to be happy, always seemed to be in
search of a fight, always had to have the last word; Uncle Reg famously said
she could start an argument in an empty room. I thought for years that it was
somehow my fault, that maybe she never really wanted to be a mother: she
was only twenty-one when I was born, stuck in a marriage that clearly wasn’t
working, forced to live with her mum because money was so tight. But her
sister, my auntie Win, told me she was always like that — that when they were
kids it was as if a dark cloud used to follow Sheila Harris around, that other
children were scared of her and that she seemed to like that.

She definitely had some deeply weird ideas about parenting. It was an era
when you kept your kids in line by clobbering them, when it was generally
held that there was nothing wrong with children that couldn’t be cured by
thumping the living daylights out of them. This was a philosophy to which
my mother was passionately wedded, which was petrifying and humiliating if
it happened in public: there’s nothing like getting a hiding outside Pinner
Sainsbury’s, in front of a visibly intrigued crowd of onlookers, for playing
havoc with your self-esteem. But some of Mum’s behaviour would have been
considered disturbing even by the standards of the time. I found out years
later that when I was two, she’d toilet-trained me by hitting me with a wire
brush until I bled if I didn’t use the potty. My nan had, understandably, gone
berserk when she found out what was going on: they didn’t speak for weeks

as a result. Nan had gone berserk again when she saw my mother’s remedy
for constipation. She laid me on the draining board in the kitchen and stuck
carbolic soap up my arse. If she liked to scare people, she must have been
overjoyed by me, because I was fucking terrified of her. I loved her — she was
my mum — but I spent my childhood in a state of high alert, always trying to
ensure that I never did anything that might set her off: if she was happy, I was
happy, albeit temporarily.

There were no problems like that with my nan. She was the person I
trusted the most. It felt like she was the centre of the family, the only one
who didn’t go out to work — my mum had graduated from driving a milk cart
during the war to working in a succession of shops. Nan was one of those
incredible old working-class matriarchs: no nonsense, hard-working, kind,
funny. I idolized her. She was the greatest cook, had the greenest fingers,
loved a drink and a game of cards. She’d had an incredibly hard life — her
father had abandoned her mother when she was pregnant, so Nan was born in
a workhouse. She never talked about it, but it seemed to have left her as
someone nothing could faze, not even the time I came howling down the
Stairs with my foreskin caught in my trouser zip and asked her to get it out.
She just sighed and got on with it, as though extracting a small boy’s penis
from a zip was the kind of thing she did every day.

Her house smelt of roast dinners and coal fires. There was always
someone at the door: either Auntie Win or Uncle Reg, or my cousins John
and Cathryn, or else the rent man, or the man from Watford Steam Laundry,
or the man who delivered the coal. And there was always music playing. The
radio was almost permanently on: Two-Way Family Favourites, Housewives’
Choice, Music While You Work, The Billy Cotton Band Show. If it wasn’t,
there were records playing on the radiogram — mostly jazz, but sometimes
classical.

I could spend hours just looking at those records, studying the different
labels. Blue Deccas, red Parlophones, bright yellow MGMs, HMVs and
RCAs, both of which, for reasons I could never figure out, had that picture of
the dog looking at the gramophone on them. They seemed like magical
objects; the fact that you put a needle on them and sound mysteriously came
out amazed me. After a while, the only presents I wanted were records and

books. I can remember the disappointment of coming downstairs and seeing a
big box wrapped up. Oh God, they’ve got me Meccano.

And we had a piano, which belonged to my nan. Auntie Win used to play
it, and eventually so did I. There were a lot of family myths about my
prodigious talent at the instrument, the most oft-repeated being that Win sat
me on her lap when I was three, and I immediately picked out the melody of
“The Skaters’ Waltz’ by ear. I’ve no idea whether that’s actually true or not,
but I was definitely playing piano at a very young age, around the time I
started at my first school, Reddiford. I’d play stuff like ‘All Things Bright
and Beautiful’, hymns I’d heard in assembly. I was just born with a good ear,
the way some people are born with a photographic memory. If I heard
something once, I could go to the piano and, more or less, play it perfectly. I
was seven when I started lessons, with a lady called Mrs Jones. Not long after
that, my parents began wheeling me out to play ‘My Old Man Said Follow
The Van’ and ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ at family gatherings and weddings. For
all the records in the house and on the radio, I think an old-fashioned sing-
song was the form of music my family loved the most.

The piano came in useful when my dad was home on leave. He was a
typical British man of the fifties in that he seemed to regard any display of
emotion, other than anger, as evidence of a fatal weakness of character. So he
wasn’t tactile, he never told you he loved you. But he liked music, and if he
heard me playing the piano, I’d get a ‘well done’, maybe an arm around the
shoulder, a sense of pride and approval. I was temporarily in his good books.
And keeping in his good books was vitally important to me. If I was
marginally less terrified of him than I was of my mother, it was only because
he wasn’t around as much. At one point, when I was six, my mum had made
the decision to move us away from Pinner and all her family, and go with my
dad to Wiltshire — he had been posted to RAF Lyneham, near Swindon. I
can’t remember much about it. I know I enjoyed playing in the countryside,
but I also recall feeling quite disorientated and confused by the change, and
falling behind at school as a result. We weren’t there for long — Mum must
have realized she had made a mistake very quickly — and after we came back
to Pinner, it felt like Dad was someone who visited rather than lived with us.

But when he did visit, things changed. Suddenly, there were all these new

rules about everything. I would get into trouble if I kicked my football off the
lawn into the flower bed, but I would also get in trouble if I ate celery in what
was deemed to be The Wrong Way. The Right Way to eat celery, in the
unlikely event that you’re interested, was apparently not to make too loud a
crunching sound when you bit into it. Once, he hit me because I was
supposedly taking my school blazer off incorrectly; sadly, I seem to have
forgotten The Right Way to take off a school blazer, vital though this
knowledge obviously was. The scene upset Auntie Win so much that she
rushed off in tears to tell my nan what was going on. Presumably worn down
by the rows over potty training and constipation, Nan told her not to get
involved.

What was going on? I haven’t got a clue. I’ve no more idea of what my
father’s problem was than I have about my mother’s. Maybe it had something
to do with him being in the forces, where there were rules about everything as
well. Maybe he felt a bit of jealousy, like he was shut out of the family
because he was away so much: all these rules were his way of imposing
himself as the head of the household. Maybe that was the way he had been
brought up, although his parents — my grandad Edwin and grandma Ellen —
didn’t seem particularly fierce. Or maybe both my parents just found dealing
with a child difficult because they’d never done it before. I don’t know. I do
know that my dad had an incredibly short fuse and that he didn’t seem to
understand how to use words. There was no calm response, no ‘now come
on, sit down’. He would just explode. The Dwight Family Temper. It was the
bane of my life as a kid, and it remained the bane of my life when it became
apparent it was hereditary. Either I was genetically predisposed to losing my
rag, or I unconsciously learned by example. Whichever it was, it has proved a
catastrophic pain in the arse for me and everyone around me for most of my
adult life.

Had it not been for Mum and Dad, I would have had a perfectly normal,
even boring fifties childhood: Muffin the Mule on TV and Saturday morning
children’s matinees at the Embassy in North Harrow; the Goons on the radio
and bread and dripping for tea on a Sunday night. Away from home, I was
perfectly happy. At eleven, I moved up to Pinner County Grammar School,
where I was conspicuously ordinary. I wasn’t bullied, nor was I a bully. I

wasn’t a swot, but I wasn’t a tearaway either; I left that to my friend John
Gates, who was one of those kids that seemed to spend their entire childhood
in detention or outside the headmaster’s office, without the range of
punishments inflicted on him making any difference at all to the way he
behaved. I was a bit overweight, but I was all right at sport without any
danger of being a star athlete. I played football and tennis — everything except
rugby. Because of my size, they put me in the scrum, where my main role
involved being repeatedly kicked in the balls by the opposing team’s prop.
No thanks.

My best mate was Keith Francis, but he was part of a big circle of friends,
girls as well as boys, people I still see now. I occasionally have class reunions
at my house. The first time, I was really nervous beforehand: it’s been fifty
years, I’m famous, I live in a big house, what are they going to think of me?
But they couldn’t have cared less. When they arrived, it might as well have
been 1959. No one seemed to have changed that much. John Gates still had a
twinkle in his eye that suggested he could be a bit of a handful.

For years, I lived a life in which nothing really happened. The height of
excitement was a school trip to Annecy, where we stayed with our French
pen pals and gawped at the sight of Citroén 2CVs, which were like no car I’d
ever seen on a British road — the seats in them looked like deckchairs. Or the
day during the Easter holidays when, for reasons lost in the mists of time,
Barry Walden, Keith and I elected to cycle from Pinner to Bournemouth, an
idea I began to question the wisdom of when I realized that their bikes had
gears and mine did not: there was a lot of frantic pedalling up hills on my
part, trying to keep up. The only danger any of us faced was that one of my
friends might be bored to death when I started talking about records. It wasn’t
enough for me to collect them. Every time I bought one, I kept a note of it in
a book. I wrote down the titles of the A and B sides and all the other
information off the label: writer, publisher, producer. I then memorized the
lot, until I became a walking musical encyclopedia. An innocent enquiry as to
why the needle skipped when you tried to play ‘Little Darlin’ by The
Diamonds would lead to me informing everyone within earshot that it was
because ‘Little Darlin” by The Diamonds was on Mercury Records, who
were distributed by Pye in the UK, and that Pye were the only label that

released 78s made from new-fangled vinyl, rather than old-fashioned shellac,
and needles made from shellac responded differently to vinyl.

But I’m not complaining at all about life being dull — I liked it that way.
Things were so exhausting at home that a dull life outside the front door
seemed oddly welcome, particularly when my parents decided to try living
together full-time again. It was just after I started at Pinner County. My dad
had been posted to RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire and we all moved
into a house in Northwood, about ten minutes away from Pinner, 111 Potter
Street. We were there for three years, long enough to prove beyond any doubt
that the marriage wasn’t working. God, it was miserable: constant fighting,
occasionally punctuated by icy silences. You couldn’t relax for a minute. If
you spend your life waiting for the next eruption of anger from your mum, or
your dad announcing another rule that you’d broken, you end up not knowing
what to do: the uncertainty of what’s going to happen next fills you with fear.
So I was incredibly insecure, scared of my own shadow. On top of that, I
thought I was somehow responsible for the state of my parents’ marriage,
because a lot of their rows would be about me. My father would tell me off,
my mother would intervene, and there would be a huge argument about how I
was being brought up. It didn’t make me feel very good about myself, which
manifested in a lack of confidence in my appearance that lasted well into
adulthood. For years and years, I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the
mirror. I really hated what I saw: I was too fat, I was too short, my face just
looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it to, including not
prematurely fall out. The other lasting effect was a fear of confrontation. That
went on for decades. I stayed in bad business relationships and bad personal
relationships because I didn’t want to rock the boat.

My response when things got too much was always to run upstairs and
lock the door, which is exactly what I used to do when my parents fought. I
would go to my bedroom, where I kept everything perfectly neat and ordered.
It wasn’t just records I collected, it was comics, books, magazines. I was
meticulous about everything. If I wasn’t writing down the details of a new
single in my notebook, I was copying all the different singles charts out of
Melody Maker, the New Musical Express, Record Mirror and Disc, then
compiling the results, averaging them out into a personal chart of charts. I’ve

always been a statistics freak. Even now, I get sent the charts every day, the
radio chart positions in America, the box office charts for films and
Broadway plays. Most artists don’t do that; they’re not interested. When I’m
talking to them, I know more about how their single’s doing than they do,
which is crazy. The official excuse is that I need to know what’s going on
because, these days, I own a company that makes films and manages artists.
The truth is that I’d be doing it if I was working in a bank. I’m just an anorak.

A psychologist would probably say that, as a kid, I was trying to create a
sense of order in a chaotic life, with my dad coming and going and all the
reprimands and rows. I didn’t have any control over that, or over my
mother’s moods, but I had control over the stuff in my room. Objects
couldn’t do me any harm. I found them comforting. I talked to them, I
behaved as if they had feelings. If something got broken, I’d feel really upset,
as if I'd killed something. During one particularly bad row, my mother threw
a record at my father and it smashed into God knows how many pieces. It
was ‘The Robin’s Return’ by Dolores Ventura, an Australian ragtime pianist.
I remember thinking, ‘How can you do that? How can you break this
beautiful thing?’

My record collection exploded when rock ’n’ roll arrived. There were
other exciting changes afoot, things that suggested life might be moving on,
out of the grey post-war world, even in suburban north-west London: the
arrival in our house of a TV and a washing machine, and the arrival in Pinner
High Street of a coffee bar, which seemed unimaginably exotic — until a
restaurant that served Chinese food opened in nearby Harrow. But they
happened slowly and gradually, a few years between them. Rock ‘n’ roll
wasn’t like that. It seemed to come out of nowhere, so fast that it was hard to
take in how completely it had altered everything. One minute, pop music
meant good old Guy Mitchell and ‘Where Will The Dimple Be?’ and Max
Bygraves singing about toothbrushes. It was polite and schmaltzy and aimed
at parents, who didn’t want to hear anything too exciting or shocking: they’d
had enough of that to last them a lifetime living through a war. The next, it
meant Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, these guys who sounded
unintelligible, like they were foaming at the mouth when they sang and who
your parents hated. Even my mum, the Elvis aficionado, bailed out when

Little Richard showed up. She thought ‘Tutti Frutti’ was just a terrible noise.

Rock and roll was like a bomb that wouldn’t stop going off: a series of
explosions that came so thick and fast it was hard to work out what was
happening. Suddenly, there seemed to be one incredible record after another.
‘Hound Dog’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’, ‘Long
Tall Sally’, “That’ll Be The Day’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Reet Petite’. I had
to get a Saturday job to keep up. Luckily, Mr Megson at Victoria Wine was
looking for someone to help out in the back of the shop, putting empty beer
bottles in crates and stacking them up. I think there was a vague idea of my
saving up some money, but I should have realized that idea was doomed to
failure from the start: Victoria Wine was next door to another record shop.
Mr Megson might as well have just put the ten bob he paid me straight into
their till and cut out the middleman. It was an early example of what turned
out to be a lifelong attitude to shopping: I’m just not very good at keeping
money in my pocket if there’s something I want to buy.

Sixty years on, it’s hard to explain how revolutionary and shocking rock
and roll seemed. Not just the music: the whole culture it represented, the
clothes and the films and the attitude. It felt like the first thing that teenagers
really owned, that was aimed exclusively at us, that made us feel different
from our parents, that made us feel we could achieve something. It’s also
hard to explain the extent to which the older generation despised it. Take
every example of moral panic pop music has provoked since — punk and
gangster rap, mods and rockers and heavy metal — then add them all together
and double it: that’s how much outrage rock and roll caused. People fucking
hated it. And no one hated it more than my father. He obviously disliked the
music itself — he liked Frank Sinatra — but more than that, he hated its social
impact, he thought the whole thing was morally wrong: ‘Look at the way
they dress, the way they act, swivelling their hips, showing their dicks. You
are not to get involved.’ If I did, I was going to turn into something called a
wide boy. A wide boy, in case you don’t know, is an old British term for a
kind of petty criminal — a confidence trickster, someone who does a bit of
wheeler-dealing or runs the odd scam. Presumably already alive to the
thought that I might go off the rails thanks to my inability to eat celery in the
correct way, he resolutely believed that rock and roll was going to result in

my utter degradation. The mere mention of Elvis or Little Richard would set
him off on an angry lecture in which my inevitable transformation into a wide
boy figured heavily: one minute I’d be happily listening to ‘Good Golly Miss
Molly’, the next thing you knew, I was apparently going to be fencing stolen
nylons or duping people into playing Find-the-Lady on the mean streets of
Pinner.

There didn’t seem much danger of that happening to me — there are
Benedictine monks wilder than I was as a teenager — but my father was
taking no risks. By the time I started at Pinner County Grammar School in
1958, you could see the way people dressed was changing, but I was
expressly forbidden from wearing anything that made me look like I had
some connection to rock and roll. Keith Francis was cutting a dash in a pair
of winkle-picker shoes that had pointed toes so long the ends of them seemed
to arrive in class several minutes before he did. I was still dressed like a
miniature version of my father. My shoes were, depressingly, the same length
as my feet. The closest I got to sartorial rebellion was my prescription
glasses, or rather, how much I wore my prescription glasses. They were only
supposed to be used for looking at the blackboard. Labouring under the
demented misapprehension that they made me look like Buddy Holly, I wore
them all the time, completely ruining my eyesight in the process. Then I had
to wear them all the time.

My failing eyesight also had unexpected consequences when it came to
sexual exploration. I can’t remember the exact circumstances in which my
dad caught me masturbating. I think I was attempting to dispose of the
evidence rather than engaged in the act itself, but I do remember I wasn’t as
mortified as I should have been, largely because I didn’t really know what I
was doing. I was a real late developer when it came to sex. I wasn’t really
interested in it at all until I was well into my twenties, although I made an
impressively concerted effort to make up for lost time after that. But at
school, I’d listen to my friends talking about it, and it would just leave me
really bemused: ‘Yeah, I took her to the cinema, got a bit of tit.” How? Why?
What was that supposed to mean?

So I think what I was doing was more about experiencing a pleasant
sensation rather than a frantic expression of my burgeoning sexuality. Either

way, when my dad caught me, he came out with the well-worn line about
how if I kept Doing That, I would go blind. Obviously, boys across the
country were given exactly the same warning, realized it was a load of
rubbish and blithely ignored it. I, on the other hand, found it preying on my
mind. What if it was true? I’d already damaged my eyesight with my
misguided attempt to look like Buddy Holly; maybe this would finish it off. I
decided it was better not to take the risk. While plenty of musicians will tell
you that Buddy Holly had a massive impact on their lives, I’m probably the
only musician that can say he inadvertently stopped me wanking, unless
Holly happened to walk in on The Big Bopper doing it while they were on
tour or something.

But despite all the rules about clothes and warnings about my sure-fire
descent into criminality, it was too late for my dad to tell me not to get
involved in rock and roll. I was already in it up to my neck. I saw Loving You
and The Girl Can’t Help It at the cinema. I started going to see live shows. A
big crowd from school headed up to the Harrow Granada every week: me,
Keith, Kaye Midlane, Barry Walden and Janet Richie were the most devoted,
regular members, along with a guy called Michael Johnson, who was the only
person I’d met who seemed just as obsessed as me about music. Sometimes,
he even seemed to know things I didn’t. A couple of years later, it was he
who came to school brandishing a copy of ‘Love Me Do’ by The Beatles,
whoever they were, claiming that they were going to be the biggest thing
since Elvis. I thought that was laying it on a bit thick until he played it to me,
when I decided he might have a point: another musical obsession was
sparked.

A ticket for the Granada was two and sixpence or five bob if you wanted
the posh seats. Either felt like good value, because they packed the shows
with singers and bands. You would see ten artists in a night: two songs from
each until the headlining act, who would do four or five. Everybody seemed
to play there, sooner or later. Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis,
Eddie Cochran, Johnny And The Hurricanes. If by any chance someone
declined to grace the Harrow Granada with their presence, you could get the
tube up to London: that’s where I saw Cliff Richard And The Drifters at the
Palladium, before his backing band changed their name to The Shadows.

Back in the suburbs, other, smaller venues started putting on bands: the South
Harrow British Legion, the Kenton Conservative Club. You could easily see
two or three gigs a week, as long as you had the money. The funny thing is, I
can’t recall ever seeing a bad gig, or coming home disappointed, although
some of the shows must have been terrible. The sound must have been
dreadful. I’m pretty certain that the South Harrow British Legion in 1960
wasn’t in possession of a PA system capable of fully conveying the brutal,
feral power of rock and roll.

And when my dad wasn’t around, I played Little Richard and Jerry Lee
Lewis songs on the piano. They were my real idols. It wasn’t just their style
of playing, although that was fabulous: they played with such aggression, like
they were assaulting the keyboard. It was the way they stood up while they
played, the way they kicked the stool and jumped on the piano. They made
playing the piano seem as visually exciting and sexy and outrageous as
playing the guitar or being a vocalist. I’d never realized it could be any of
those things before.

I was inspired enough to play a few gigs at local youth clubs, with a band
called The Corvettes. It was nothing serious; the other members were all still
at school too — they went to Northwood, the local secondary modern — and it
only lasted a few months: most of the gigs we played, we got paid in Coca-
Cola. But suddenly, I had an idea what I wanted to do with my life and it
didn’t involve my father’s plans for me, which centred around either joining
the RAF or working in a bank. I would never have dared say it aloud, but I
quietly decided he could stick both those plans up his arse. Maybe rock and
roll had changed me in the rebellious way Dad feared after all.

Or maybe we never really had anything in common, except football. All
the happy childhood memories of my dad are related to that: he came from a
family of football fanatics. Two of his nephews were professional players,
both for Fulham in south-west London — Roy Dwight and John Ashen. As a
treat, he would take me to watch them from the touchline at Craven Cottage,
in the days when Jimmy Hill was their inside right and Bedford Jezzard was
their highest scorer. Even off the pitch, Roy and John seemed like incredibly
glamorous figures to me; I was always slightly in awe when I met them. After
his career ended, John became a very astute businessman with a thing for

American cars — he’d turn up to visit us in Pinner with his wife, Bet, parking
an unreal-looking Cadillac or a Chevrolet outside the house. And Roy was a
fantastic player, a right-winger who transferred to Nottingham Forest. He
played for them in the 1959 FA Cup Final. I watched it at home on TV, with
a supply of chocolate eggs I’d saved from Easter in anticipation of this
momentous event. I didn’t eat the chocolate so much as cram it in my mouth
in a state of hysteria. I couldn’t believe what was happening on the screen.
After ten minutes, Roy scored the opening goal. He was already on the verge
of a call-up for England. Now he’d surely sealed his fate: my cousin — an
actual relative of mine — was going to play for England. It seemed as
unbelievable as John’s taste in cars. Fifteen minutes later, they were carrying
him off on a stretcher. He’d broken his leg in a tackle and that was what
sealed his fate. His football career was basically over. He tried, but he was
never the same player again. He ended up becoming a PE teacher at a boys’
school in south London.

My dad’s team were the substantially less glamorous and awe-inducing
Watford. I was six when he first took me to see them play. They were toiling
away at the bottom of something called the Third Division South, which was
as low as you could get in the football league without being thrown out
entirely. In fact, not long before I started going to Watford games, they had
played so badly that they actually had been thrown out of the football league;
they were allowed to stay after applying for re-election. Their ground at
Vicarage Road seemed to tell you all you needed to know about the team. It
only had two very old, very rickety, very small covered stands. It doubled as
a greyhound racing track. If I’d had any sense, I would have taken one look at
it, considered Watford’s recent form, and opted to support a team that could
actually play football. I could have saved myself twenty years of almost
unmitigated misery. But football doesn’t work like that, or at least it
shouldn’t. It’s in your blood: Watford were my dad’s team, therefore Watford
were my team.

And besides, I didn’t care about the ground, or the hopelessness of the
team, or the freezing cold. I loved it all straight away. The thrill of seeing live
sport for the first time, the excitement of getting the train to Watford and
walking through the town to the ground, the newspaper sellers that came

round at half-time and told you the scores in other games, the ritual of always
standing in the same spot on the terraces, an area by the Shrodells Stand
called The Bend. It was like taking a drug to which you instantly became
addicted. I was as obsessive about football as I was about music: when I
wasn’t compiling my chart of charts in my bedroom, I was cutting football
league ladders out of my comics, sticking them to my wall and making sure
the scores on them were completely up to date. It’s one addiction I’ve never
shaken, because I’ve never wanted to, and it was hereditary, passed on to me
by my dad.

When I was eleven, my piano teacher had put me forward for the Royal
Academy of Music in central London. I passed the exam, and for the next
five years that was my Saturday: studying classical music in the morning,
Watford in the afternoon. I preferred the latter to the former. At the time, the
Royal Academy of Music seemed to smell of fear. Everything about it was
intimidating: the huge, imposing Edwardian building on Marylebone Road,
its august history of turning out composers and conductors, the fact that
anything that wasn’t classical music was expressly forbidden. It’s completely
different today — whenever I go there now, it’s a really joyful place; the
students are encouraged to go off and do pop or jazz or their own writing as
well as their classical training. But back then, even talking about rock and roll
at the Royal Academy would have been sacrilege, like turning up to church
and telling the vicar that you’re really interested in worshipping Satan.

Sometimes the Royal Academy was fun. I had a great teacher called
Helen Piena, I loved singing in the choir and I really enjoyed playing Mozart
and Bach and Beethoven and Chopin, the melodic stuff. Other times, it
seemed like a real drag. I was a lazy student. Some weeks, if I’d forgotten to
do my homework, I didn’t bother to turn up at all. I’'d ring from home,
putting on a voice and saying I was ill, and then — so my mum didn’t realize I
was dodging — take the train up to Baker Street. Then I’d go and sit on the
tube. I’d go round and round the Circle Line for three and a half hours,
reading The Pan Book of Horror Stories instead of practising Bartok. I knew
I didn’t want to be a classical musician. For one thing, I wasn’t good enough.
I don’t have the hands for it. My fingers are short for a piano player. If you
see a photo of a concert pianist, they’ve all got hands like tarantulas. And for

another, it just wasn’t what I wanted out of music — having everything
regimented, playing the right notes at the right time with the right feeling, no
room for improvisation.

In a way, it’s ironic that I ended up being made a Doctor and an Honorary
Member of the Royal Academy years later — I was never going to win an
award for star pupil while I was there. But in another way, it isn’t ironic at
all. ’'d never, ever say the Royal Academy was a waste of time for me. I’m
really proud to have gone there. I’ve done benefit gigs and raised money for a
new pipe organ for them; I’ve toured with the Royal Academy Symphony
Orchestra in Britain and America; I pay for eight scholarships there every
year. The place was full of people I’d end up working with, years later, when
I became Elton John: the producer Chris Thomas, the arranger Paul
Buckmaster, harpist Skaila Kanga and percussionist Ray Cooper. And what I
learned there seeped into my music: it taught me about collaboration, about
chord structures and how to put a song together. It made me interested in
writing with more than three or four chords. If you listen to the Elton John
album, and virtually every album I made afterwards, you can hear the
influence of classical music and of the Royal Academy on it somewhere.

It was while I was studying at the Royal Academy that my parents finally
got divorced. In fairness to them, they had tried to make their marriage work,
even though it was obvious they couldn’t bear each other; I suspect because
they wanted to give me stability. It was completely the wrong thing to do, but
they made an effort. Then, in 1960, my father was posted to Harrogate in
Yorkshire, and while he was there, Mum met someone else. And that was the
end of that.

My mum and I moved in with her new partner, Fred, who was a painter
and decorator. It was a really hard time financially. Fred was a divorcee too;
he had an ex-wife and four children, so money was really tight. We lived in a
horrible flat in Croxley Green, with peeling wallpaper and damp. Fred
worked really hard. He did window cleaning and odd jobs on top of his
decorating: anything to make sure we had food on the table. It was tough on
him and it was tough on my mum. Uncle Reg had been right — there really
was a Stigma around getting divorced in those days.

But I was so happy they’d got divorced. The daily friction of my mum

and dad being together was gone. Mum had got what she wanted — rid of my
father — and, for a while at least, it seemed to change her. She was happy, and
that happiness trickled down to me. There were fewer moods, less criticism.
And I really liked Fred. He was generous and big-hearted and easy-going. He
saved up and got me a drop-handlebar bike. He thought it was funny when I
started saying his name backwards and calling him Derf, a nickname that
stuck. There weren’t any more restrictions on what I wore. I started calling
Derf my stepdad years before he and Mum got married.

Best of all, Derf liked rock and roll. He and Mum were really supportive
of my music career. I suppose there was an added incentive for my mum,
because she knew that encouraging me would infuriate my father, but, for a
while at least, she seemed to be my biggest fan. And Derf got me my first
paying gig, as a pianist in the Northwood Hills Hotel, which wasn’t a hotel at
all, it was a pub. Derf was having a pint there when he learned from the
landlord that their regular pianist had quit, and suggested they give me a try. I
would play everything I could think of. Jim Reeves songs, Johnnie Ray, Elvis
Presley, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’. Al Jolson numbers: they loved Al
Jolson. But not as much as they loved old British pub songs that everyone
could sing along to: ‘Down At The Old Bull And Bush’, ‘Any Old Iron’, ‘My
Old Man’, the same things my family liked to have a sing-song to after a
couple of drinks. I made really good money. My pay was only a pound a
night, three nights a week, but Derf would come with me and take a pint pot
around and collect tips. Sometimes I could end up with £15 a week, which
was a massive amount for a fifteen-year-old kid to be making in the early
sixties. I saved up and bought an electric piano — a Hohner Pianette — and a
microphone so I could make myself better heard over the noise of the pub.

As well as earning me money, the pub pianist’s job had another important
function. It made me pretty fearless as a performer, because the Northwood
Hills Hotel was by no stretch of the imagination Britain’s most salubrious
venue. I played in the public bar, not the more upscale saloon next door, and
virtually every night, when enough booze had been consumed, there would
be a fight. I don’t mean a verbal altercation, I mean a proper fight: glasses
flying, tables being pushed over. At first I’d try and keep playing, in the vain
hope that music might soothe the situation. If a burst of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’

failed to work the intended magic, then I would have to turn to a group of
travellers who regularly came to the pub for help. I’d become friendly with
one of their daughters — she’d even asked me around to their caravan for
dinner — and they would make sure I was all right when the pub kicked off.
And if they weren’t in that night, I would have to deploy my last resort
option. This involved climbing out of the window next to the piano and
coming back later when things had calmed down. It was terrifying, but at
least it made me mentally tough when it came to playing live. I know artists
who’ve been completely destroyed by the experience of playing a bad gig to
an unappreciative audience. I’ve played bad gigs to unappreciative audiences
as well, but they’ve never impacted on me too deeply. If I don’t actually have
to stop performing and climb out of a window in fear of my life, it’s still an
improvement on how I started out.

Up in Yorkshire, my dad met a woman called Edna. They got married,
moved to Essex and opened a paper shop. He must have been happier — they
had four more sons, all of whom adored him — but he didn’t seem any
different to me. It was like he didn’t know any other way to behave around
me. He was still distant and strict, still moaning about the terrible influence of
rock and roll, still consumed by the idea that I was going to turn into a wide
boy and bring disgrace on the Dwight family name. Getting on the Green
Line bus to Essex to visit him was the reliable low point of any week. I
stopped going to Watford with him: I was old enough to stand on The Bend
by myself.

Dad must have gone berserk when he found out I was planning on leaving
school before sitting my A-levels, to take up a job in the music business. He
really didn’t think it was a suitable career for a boy with a grammar school
education. To make matters worse, it was his own nephew who got me the
job: my cousin Roy, he of the goal in the FA Cup, who had stayed on good
terms with my mum after the divorce. Footballers always seemed to have
links with the music industry and he was friends with a guy called Tony
Hiller, who was the general manager of the Mills Music publishing company
in Denmark Street, Britain’s answer to Tin Pan Alley. Via Roy, I found out
that there was a job going in the packing department — it wasn’t much, the
pay was £4 a week, but it was a foot in the door. And I knew I had no chance

of passing my A-levels anyway. Somewhere between the Royal Academy,
practising playing the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis and climbing out of the
window of the Northwood Hills Hotel on a regular basis, my schoolwork had
started to slide.

I say he must have gone berserk, because I honestly can’t remember his
reaction. I know he wrote to my mum demanding that she stop me, but you
can imagine how that went down: she was absolutely delighted. Everyone
else seemed pleased for me — Mum and Derf, even my school headmaster,
which seemed almost miraculous. Mr Westgate-Smith was a very stern, strict
man. I was absolutely terrified when I went to see him, to explain about the
job. But he was really wonderful. He said he knew how much I loved music,
he knew about the Royal Academy, and that he would let me leave if I
promised to work hard and give everything I had to the project. I was
amazed, but he meant it. He could easily have refused; I would have gone
anyway, but I would have left school under a cloud. Instead he was really
supportive. Years later, after I became successful, he used to write to me
telling me how proud he was of what I’d done.

And in a perverse way, my dad’s attitude helped me, too. He never
changed his mind about my career choice. He never said well done. Not long
ago, his wife Edna wrote to me and told me that he was proud of me in his
Own way; it just wasn’t in his make-up to express it. But the fact that he never
expressed it instilled in me a desire to show him that I’d made the right
decision. It made me driven. I thought the more successful I got, the more it
proved him wrong, whether he acknowledged it or not. Even today, I still
sometimes think that I’m trying to show my father what I’m made of, and
he’s been dead since 1991.

two

With perfect timing, I arrived at my first job in Denmark Street just as
Denmark Street went into terminal decline. Ten years before, it had been the
centre of the British music industry, where writers went to sell their songs to
publishers, who’d in turn sell them to artists. Then The Beatles and Bob
Dylan had come along and changed everything. They didn’t need the help of
professional songwriters: it turned out they were professional songwriters.
More bands started appearing with a songwriter in their ranks: The Kinks,
The Who, The Rolling Stones. It was obvious that was how things were
going to be from now on. There was still just about enough work to keep
Denmark Street going — not every new band could write their own material
and there was still an army of vocalists and easy-listening crooners who
sourced their songs the old-fashioned way — but the writing was on the wall.
Even my new job at Mills Music seemed like a throwback to a bygone
era. It had nothing to do with pop at all. My duties consisted of parcelling up
sheet music for brass bands and taking the packages to the post office
opposite the Shaftesbury Theatre. I wasn’t even in the main building: the
packing department was round the back. That it couldn’t have been less
glamorous was underlined when Chelsea’s star midfielder Terry Venables
and a handful of his teammates unexpectedly turned up there one afternoon.
They were being pursued by the press — there was a scandal at the time about
them going out drinking after a game against the manager’s orders — and had
opted to hide out in my new workplace. They knew Mills Music well — they
were footballing friends, like my cousin Roy — and had clearly realized that
the packing department was literally the last place in London you would look

if you were searching for someone famous.

But I had a ball. It was a foot in the door of the music industry. And even
if Denmark Street was on its last legs, it still held a magic for me. There was
a kind of glamour there, albeit fading glamour. There were guitar shops and
recording studios. You would get your lunch at the Gioconda coffee bar or
the Lancaster Grill on Charing Cross Road. You wouldn’t see anybody
famous in there — they were restaurants for people who couldn’t afford any
better — but there was a buzz about them: they were full of hopefuls, would-
bes, would-never-bes, people who wanted to be spotted. People, I suppose,
like me.

Back in Pinner, my mum, Derf and I had moved out of the rented flat in
Croxley Green, with the damp and the peeling wallpaper, into a new place, a
few miles away in Northwood Hills, not far from the pub whose window I’d
scrambled out of on a regular basis. Frome Court looked like an ordinary
detached suburban house from the outside, but inside it was divided up into
two-bedroom flats. Ours was 3A. It felt like a home, unlike our previous
residence, which had felt like a punishment for Mum and Derf both getting
divorced: you’ve done something wrong, so you have to live here. And I was
playing the electric piano I’d bought with the proceeds from my pub gig ina
new band, started by another ex-member of The Corvettes, Stuart A Brown.
Bluesology were much more serious. We had ambition: Stuart was a really
good-looking guy, convinced he was going to be a star. We had a saxophone
player. We had a set full of obscure blues tracks by Jimmy Witherspoon and
J. B. Lenoir that we rehearsed in a Northwood pub called the Gate. We even
had a manager, a Soho jeweller called Arnold Tendler: our drummer, Mick
Inkpen, worked for him. Arnold was a sweet little man who wanted to get
into the music business, and had the terrible misfortune to pick Bluesology as
his big investment opportunity after Mick convinced him to come and see a
gig. He sank his money into equipment for us and stage outfits — identical
polo neck jumpers, trousers and shoes — and got absolutely no return, unless
you counted us constantly moaning at him when things went wrong.

We started playing gigs around London, and Arnold paid for us to record
a demo at a studio in a prefabricated hut in Rickmansworth. By some miracle,
Armold managed to get the demo to Fontana Records. More miraculous still,

they put out a single, a song I’d written — or rather, the only song I’d written
— called ‘Come Back Baby’. It did absolutely nothing. It was played a couple
of times on the radio, I suspect on the less salubrious pirate stations where
they would play anything if the record label bunged them some dosh. There
was a rumour it was going to be on Juke Box Jury one week, and we duly
crowded round the television. It wasn’t on Juke Box Jury. Then we put out
another single, also written by me, called ‘Mr Frantic’. This time, there
wasn’t even a rumour it was going to be on Juke Box Jury. It just vanished.

Towards the end of 1965, we got a job with Roy Tempest, an agent who
specialized in bringing black American artists over to Britain. He had a fish
tank full of piranhas in his office, and his business practices were as sharp as
their teeth. If he couldn’t get The Temptations or The Drifters to cross the
Atlantic, he would find a handful of unknown black singers in London, put
them in suits and book them on a nightclub tour, billed as The Temptin’
Temptations or The Fabulous Drifters. When anyone complained, he would
feign ignorance: ‘Of course they’re not The Temptations! They’re The
Temptin’ Temptations! Completely different band!’ So Roy Tempest
effectively invented the tribute act.

In a sense, Bluesology got off lightly in their dealings with him. At least
the artists for whom we were employed as a backing band were the real
thing: Major Lance, Patti LaBelle And The Blue Belles, Fontella Bass, Lee
Dorsey. And the work meant I could stop parcelling up brass band music for
a living and become a professional musician. I didn’t really have a choice.
There was no way I could hold down a day job and work to the schedule of
gigs that Tempest set up. Unfortunately, the pay was terrible. Bluesology got
fifteen quid a week, out of which we had to pay for petrol for the van and
food and lodgings: if you played too far away from London to drive home
after the gig, you would book into a B&B at five bob a night. I’m sure the
Stars we were backing weren’t getting much more. The workload was
punishing. Up and down the motorway, night after night. We played the big
regional clubs: the Oasis in Manchester, the Mojo in Sheffield, the Place in
Hanley, Club A Go Go in Newcastle, Clouds in Derby. We played the cool
London clubs: Sybilla’s, The Scotch of St James, where The Beatles and the
Stones drank whisky and Coke, and the Cromwellian, with its remarkable

barman, Harry Heart, a man almost as famous as the pop stars he served.
Harry was very camp, talked in Polari and kept a mysterious vase full of clear
liquid on the counter. The mystery was solved when you offered to buy him a
drink: ‘Gin and tonic, please, and have one for yourself, Harry.’ He’d say,
‘Ooh, thank you, love, bona, bona, just one for the pot, then.” And he’d pour
out a measure of gin, throw it into the vase and drink out of it between
serving people. The real mystery was how a man who apparently drank a
large vase full of neat gin on a nightly basis remained vertical as the evening
wore on.

And we played the most bizarre clubs. There was a place in Harlesden
that was basically someone’s front room, and a place in Spitalfields where,
for reasons I never quite established, they had a boxing ring instead of a
stage. We played a lot of black clubs, which should have been intimidating —
a bunch of white kids from the suburbs trying to play black music to a black
audience — but somehow never was. For one thing, the audiences just seemed
to love the music. And for another, if you’ve spent your teens trying to play
‘Roll Out The Barrel’ while the clientele of a Northwood Hills pub beat the
living shit out of each other, you don’t scare that easily.

In fact, the only time I felt uneasy was in Balloch, just outside Glasgow.
We arrived at the venue to discover the stage was about nine feet tall. This, it
quickly transpired, was a security measure: it stopped the audience trying to
climb onstage and kill the musicians. With that particular avenue of pleasure
closed off to them, they settled instead for trying to kill each other. When
they arrived, they lined up on either side of the club. The opening note of our
set was clearly the agreed signal for the evening’s festivities to begin.
Suddenly, there were pint glasses flying and punches being thrown. It wasn’t
a gig so much as a small riot with accompaniment from an r’n’b band. It
made Saturday night in the Northwood Hills look like the State Opening of
Parliament.

We played two gigs a night, almost every night — more if we tried to
supplement our income by playing our own shows. One Saturday, Roy
booked us to play an American services club in Lancaster Gate at 2 p.m.
Then we got in the van and drove to Birmingham, and played two shows he
had booked us there — at the Ritz and then the Plaza. Then we got back in the

van again, drove back to London and played a show he’d booked us at Count
Suckle’s Cue club in Paddington. The Cue was a really cutting-edge black
club that mixed soul and ska, one of the first places in London to book not
just US artists but West Indian ones too. To be honest, my main memory of it
isn’t its groundbreaking cocktail of American and Jamaican music, but the
fact that it had a food counter that served fantastic Cornish pasties. Even the
most obsessive music fan develops a slightly different sense of priorities
when it’s six in the morming and they’re starving to death.

Sometimes Roy Tempest got the bookings catastrophically wrong. He
brought The Ink Spots over, apparently in the belief that, if they were a black
American vocal group, they must be a soul band. But they were a vocal
harmony group from a completely different era, pre-rock ‘n’ roll. They’d start
singing ‘Whispering Grass’ or ‘Back In Your Own Back Yard’ and the
audiences would just dissipate — they were wonderful songs, but not what the
kids in the soul clubs wanted to hear. It was heartbreaking — until we got to
the Twisted Wheel in Manchester. The audience there were such music
lovers, so knowledgeable about black music’s history, that they completely
got it. They turned up with their parents’ 78s for The Ink Spots to sign. At the
end of the set they literally lifted them off the stage and carried them around
the club on their shoulders. People talk about Swinging London in the mid-
sixties, but those kids in the Twisted Wheel were so clued-up, so switched-
on, so much hipper than anyone else in the country.

In truth, I didn’t care about the money or the workload, or the occasional
bad gig. The whole thing was a dream come true for me. I was playing with
artists whose records I collected. My favourite was Billy Stewart, an
absolutely enormous guy from Washington DC, signed to Chess Records. He
was an amazing singer, who had turned his weight problem into a kind of
gimmick. His songs kept alluding to it: ‘she said I was her pride and joy, that
she was in love with a fat boy’. He had a legendary temper — it was rumoured
that when a secretary at Chess took too long to buzz him into the building he
had expressed his irritation by pulling a gun and shooting the door handle off
— and, we quickly discovered, a legendary bladder. If Billy asked for the van
to pull over on the motorway because he needed to pee, you had to cancel
whatever plans you had for the rest of the evening. You were there for hours.

The noise from the bushes was incredible: it sounded like someone filling a
swimming pool with a fire hose.

Playing with these people was terrifying, and not merely because some of
them were rumoured to shoot things when they lost their temper. Their sheer
talent was scary. It was an incredible education. It wasn’t just the quality of
their voices, it was that they were fantastic entertainers. The way they moved,
the way they spoke between songs, the way they could manipulate an
audience, the way they dressed. They had such style, such panache.
Sometimes they displayed some peculiar quirks — for some reason, Patti
Labelle insisted on favouring the audience with a version of ‘Danny Boy’ at
every gig — but you could learn so much about artistry by watching them
onstage for an hour. I couldn’t believe they were just cult figures over here.
They’d had big American hits, but in Britain, white pop stars had seized on
their songs, covered them and invariably been more successful. Wayne
Fontana And The Mindbenders seemed to be the chief offenders: they’d re-
recorded Major Lance’s ‘Um Um Um Um Um Um’ and Patti LaBelle’s ‘A
Groovy Kind Of Love’ and vastly outsold the originals. Billy Stewart’s
‘Sitting In The Park’ had flopped while Georgie Fame had the hit. You could
tell this rankled with them, and understandably so. In fact, I got a good idea
just how much it rankled with them when a mod in the audience at the Ricky-
Tick club in Windsor made the mistake of shouting out ‘We want Georgie
Fame!’ in a sarcastic voice, as Billy Stewart sang ‘Sitting In The Park’. I’ve
never seen a man that size move so fast. He jumped offstage, into the crowd,
and went after him. The kid literally ran out of the club in fear for his life, as
indeed you might if a trigger-happy twenty-four-stone soul singer had taken a
sudden dislike to you.

In March 1966, Bluesology went to Hamburg — carrying our instruments
on the ferry, then on a train — to play at the Top Ten Club on the Reeperbahn.
It was legendary, because it was one of the places The Beatles had played
before they were famous. They were living in the club’s attic when they made
their first single with Tony Sheridan. The set-up hadn’t changed in the
intervening five years. The accommodation for bands was still in the attic.
There were still brothels with prostitutes sitting in the windows just down the
street, and at the club you were still expected to play five hours a night,

alternating with another band: an hour on, an hour off, while the clientele
drifted in and out. It was easy to imagine The Beatles living the same life, not
least because it looked suspiciously like the bed sheets in the attic hadn’t
been changed since John and Paul had slept in them.

We played as Bluesology and we also backed a Scottish singer called
Isabel Bond, who’d relocated from Glasgow to Germany. She was hilarious,
this sweet-looking dark-haired girl who turned out to be the most foul-
mouthed woman I’ve ever met. She’d sing old standards and change the
words so they were filthy. She’s the only singer I’ve ever heard who could
work the phrase ‘give us a wank’ into ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’.

But I was so innocent. I barely drank and I still wasn’t interested in sex,
largely because I’d managed to get to the age of nineteen without gaining any
real knowledge or understanding of what sex actually was. Aside from my
father’s questionable assertion that masturbating made you go blind, nobody
had furnished me with any information about what you did or were supposed
to do. I had no idea about penetration, no idea what a blow job was. As a
result, I’m probably the only British musician of the sixties who went to work
on the Reeperbahn and came back still in possession of his virginity. There I
was, in one of Europe’s most notorious fleshpots, every conceivable kink and
persuasion catered for, and the raciest thing I did was buy a pair of flared
trousers from a department store. All I cared about was playing and going to
German record shops. I was totally absorbed by music. I was incredibly
ambitious.

And, in my heart, I knew Bluesology weren’t going to make it. We
weren’t good enough. It was obvious. We’d gone from playing obscure blues
to playing the same soul songs that virtually every British r’n’b band played
in the mid-sixties — ‘In The Midnight Hour’, ‘Hold On I’m Coming’. You
could hear The Alan Bown Set or The Mike Cotton Sound playing them
better than us. There were superior vocalists to Stuart out there, and there
were certainly far superior organ players to me. I was a pianist, I wanted to
hammer the keys like Little Richard, and if you try and do that on an organ,
the sound it makes can ruin your whole day. I didn’t have any of the technical
knowledge you need to play an organ properly. The worst instrument was the
Hammond B-12 that was permanently installed on the stage of the Flamingo

club in Wardour Street. It was an enormous wooden thing, like playing a
chest of drawers. It was covered in switches and levers, draw bars and pedals.
Stevie Winwood or Manfred Mann would deploy all of them to make the
Hammond scream and sing and soar. I, on the other hand, didn’t dare touch
them because I had literally no idea what any of them did. Even the little Vox
Continental I usually played was a technical minefield. One key had a habit
of sticking down. It happened midway through a set at The Scotch of St
James. One minute I was playing ‘Land Of A Thousand Dances’, the next my
organ was making a noise that sounded like the Luftwaffe had turned up over
London to give the Blitz another go. The rest of the band gamely continued
dancing in the alley with Long Tall Sally and twisting with Lucy doing the
Watusi while I attempted to fix the situation by panicking wildly. I was
contemplating calling 999 when Eric Burdon, the lead singer of The Animals,
got onstage. A man clearly blessed with the complex technical expertise I
lacked — The Animals’ keyboard player Alan Price was a genius on the Vox
Continental — he thumped the organ with his fist and the key was released.

“That happens to Alan all the time,’ he nodded, and walked off.

So we weren’t as good as the bands who were doing the same thing as us,
and the bands who were doing the same thing as us weren’t as good as the
bands who wrote their own material. When Bluesology were booked to play
at the Cedar Club in Birmingham, we arrived early and found a rehearsal in
progress. It was The Move, a local quintet who were obviously on the verge
of big things. They had a wild stage act, a manager with the gift of the gab
and a guitarist called Roy Wood who could write songs. We snuck in and
watched them. Not only did they sound amazing, Roy Wood’s songs sounded
better than the cover versions they played. Only someone who was clinically
insane would have said that about the handful of tracks I’d written for
Bluesology. To be honest, I’d only written them because I absolutely had to,
because we had one of our very infrequent recording sessions coming up and
needed at least some material of our own. I wasn’t exactly pouring my heart
and soul into them, and you could tell. But I can remember watching The
Move and having a kind of revelation. This is it, isn’t it? This is the way
forward. This is what I should be doing.

In fact, I might have left Bluesology sooner had Long John Baldry not

come into the picture. We got the job with him because we were in the right
place at the right time. Bluesology just happened to be performing in the
south of France when Long John Baldry found himself without a backing
band to play the Papagayo club in St-Tropez. His original idea was to form
another band like Steampacket with himself, Stuart Brown, a boy called Alan
Walker — who I think got the job because Baldry fancied him — singing, and a
girl who had just arrived in London from the US, Marsha Hunt, taking the
female vocalist’s role. Bluesology were to be his backing band, at least after
he’d revamped the line-up slightly: a couple of musicians he didn’t like got
the push and were replaced with ones he thought were better suited. It wasn’t
really what I wanted to do. I thought that line-up was a real step down for
John. I knew how good Julie Driscoll and Rod were. I’d seen Rod playing
with John at the Kenton Conservative Club when the band were still called
The Hoochie Coochie Men and I was still at school, and he’d blown me
away. And Brian Auger was a real musician’s musician: he didn’t seem like
the kind of organist who’d ever require the lead singer of The Animals to
climb onstage and offer a helpful thump in the middle of a show.

So I had my reservations. The line-up with Alan Walker and Marsha Hunt
didn’t last long anyway: Marsha looked incredible, this gorgeous, tall black
girl, but she wasn’t a great singer. Even so, I had to admit that, with Long
John Baldry around, things suddenly got a lot more interesting. Indeed, if you
ever feel your life is getting a little routine, a bit humdrum, I can
wholeheartedly recommend going on tour in the company of a hugely
eccentric six-foot-seven gay blues singer with a drink problem. You’ll find
things liven up quite considerably.

I just loved John’s company. He’d pick me up outside Frome Court in his
van, which came complete with its own record player, alerting me to his
arrival by leaning out of the window and screaming ‘REGGIE!’ at the top of
his voice. His life seemed packed with incident, often linked to his boozing,
which I quickly worked out was self-destructive: the big clue came when we
played the Links Pavilion in Cromer and he got so pissed after the show that
he fell down a nearby cliff in his white suit. But I didn’t realize that he was
gay. I know it seems incredible in retrospect. This was a man who called
himself Ada, referred to other men as ‘she’ or ‘her’ and continually gave you

in-depth reports on the state of his sex life: ‘I’ve got this new boyfriend
called Ozzie — darling, he spins around on my dick.’ But again, I was so
naive, I honestly had no real understanding of what being gay meant, and I
certainly didn’t know that the term might have applied to me. I’d just sit there
thinking, ‘What? He spins around on your dick? How? Why? What on earth
are you talking about?’

It was hugely entertaining, but none of it changed the fact that I didn’t
want to be an organist, I didn’t want to be a backing musician and I didn’t
want to be in Bluesology. Which is why I ended up at Liberty Records’ new
offices, just off Piccadilly, prefacing my audition for the label by pouring out
my woes: the stasis of Bluesology’s career, the horror of the cabaret circuit,
the tape machine and its role in our legendary non-performance of ‘Let The
Heartaches Begin’.

On the other side of the desk, Ray Williams nodded sympathetically. He
was very blond, very handsome, very well dressed and very young. As it
turned out, he was so young that he didn’t have the power to give anyone a
contract. The decision lay with his bosses. They might have signed me had I
not chosen Jim Reeves’s ‘He’ll Have To Go’ as my audition piece. My logic
was that everybody else would sing something like ‘My Girl’ or a Motown
track, so I’d do something different and stand out. And I really love ‘He’ll
Have To Go’. I felt confident singing it: it used to knock them dead in the
Northwood Hills public bar. Had I thought twice, I might have realized that it
wasn’t going to muster much enthusiasm among people who were trying to
Start a progressive rock label. Liberty signed The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band,
The Groundhogs and The Idle Race, a psychedelic band fronted by Jeff
Lynne, who went on to form the Electric Light Orchestra. The last thing they
wanted was Pinner’s answer to Jim Reeves.

Then again, maybe singing ‘He’ll Have To Go’ was exactly the right
thing to do. If I’'d passed the audition, Ray might not have handed me the
envelope containing Bernie’s lyrics. And if he hadn’t handed me Bernie’s
lyrics, I don’t really know what would have happened, although I’ve spent a
lot of time thinking about it, because it seems like such an incredible twist of
fate. I should point out that Ray’s office was chaos. There were piles of reel-
to-reel tapes and hundreds of envelopes everywhere: he hadn’t just been

contacted by every aspiring musician and writer in Britain, but by every
nutcase who’d seen Liberty’s ‘talent wanted’ advert too. He seemed to pull
the envelope out at random, just to give me something to take away, so the
meeting didn’t feel like a dead loss — I can’t remember if he’d even opened it
or not before he gave it to me. And yet that envelope had my future in it:
everything that’s happened to me since happened because of what it
contained. You try and figure that out without giving yourself a headache.

Who knows? Maybe I would have found another writing partner, or
joined another band, or made my way as a musician without it. But I do know
my life and my career would have been very different, most likely
substantially worse — it’s hard to see how it could have turned out any better
— and I suspect you wouldn’t be reading this now.

Oe

Liberty Records weren’t interested in the first songs that Bernie and I wrote
together, so Ray offered to sign us to a publishing company he had set up.
There was no money in it unless we actually sold some songs, but for the
moment that didn’t seem to matter: Ray really believed in me. He even tried
to set me up with a couple of other lyricists, but it didn’t work out with them
the way it did with Bernie. The others wanted us to work together, writing the
music and the lyrics at the same time, and I couldn’t do that. I had to have the
words written down in front of me before I could write a song. I needed that
kick-start, that inspiration. And there was just a magic that happened when I
saw Bernie’s lyrics, which made me want to write music. It happened the
moment I first opened the envelope, on the tube train home from Baker
Street, and it’s been happening ever since.

The songs were really flowing out of us. They were better than anything
I’d written before, which admittedly wasn’t saying much. Actually, only
some of them were better than anything I’d written before. We wrote two
kinds of songs. The first were things we thought we could sell, to Cilla Black,
say, or Engelbert Humperdinck: big weepy ballads, jaunty bubblegum pop.
They were awful — sometimes I shuddered at the thought that the weepies
weren’t that different from the dreaded ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’ — but that
was how you made your money as a songwriting team for hire. Those big

middle-of-the-road stars were your target market. It was a target we missed
every time. The biggest name we managed to sell a song to was the actor
Edward Woodward, who occasionally moonlighted as an easy-listening
crooner. His album was called This Man Alone, a title that eerily predicted its
audience.

And then there were the songs we wanted to write, influenced by The
Beatles, The Moody Blues, Cat Stevens, Leonard Cohen, the kind of stuff we
were buying from Musicland, a record shop in Soho that Bernie and I
haunted so frequently that the staff would ask me to help out behind the
counter when one of them wanted to get some lunch. It was the tail end of the
psychedelic era, so we wrote a lot of whimsical stuff with lyrics about
dandelions and teddy bears. We were really just trying on other people’s
styles and finding none of them quite fitted us, but that’s how the process of
discovering your own voice works, and the process was fun. Everything was
fun. Bernie had moved to London and our friendship had really bloomed. We
got on so well, it felt like he was the brother I’d never had, a state of affairs
magnified by the fact that we were, at least temporarily, sleeping in bunk
beds in my bedroom at Frome Court. We would spend the days writing —
Bernie tapping out lyrics on a typewriter in the bedroom, bringing them to me
at the upright piano in the living room, then scurrying back to the bedroom
again as I started to set them to music. We couldn’t be in the same room if we
were writing, but if we weren’t writing, we spent all our time together, in
record shops, at the cinema. At night, we would go to gigs or hang around the
musicians’ clubs, watching Harry Heart drink his vase full of gin, chatting to
other young hopefuls. There was a funny little guy we knew who — in
keeping with the flower-power mood of the times — had changed his name to
Hans Christian Anderson. The aura of fairy tale otherworldliness conjured by
this pseudonym was slightly punctured when he opened his mouth and a
thick Lancashire accent came out. Eventually he changed his first name back
to Jon and became the lead singer of Yes.

We recorded both our types of song in a tiny four-track studio in the New
Oxford Street offices of Dick James Music, which administrated Ray’s own
publishing company: it later became famous because it was where The
Troggs were covertly recorded shouting and swearing at each other for eleven

minutes while trying to write a song — ‘you’re talking out the back of your
fuckin’ arses!’ ‘Fuckin’ drummer — I shit him!’ — a recording that later got
released as the notorious Troggs Tape. Caleb Quaye was the in-house
engineer, a multi-instrumentalist with a joint permanently smouldering
between his fingers. Caleb was very hip and he didn’t let you forget it. He
spent half his life guffawing at things Bernie or I had said or done or worn
that indicated our desperate lack of cool. But, like Ray, he seemed to believe
in what we were doing. When he wasn’t rolling on the floor in hysterics or
wiping tears of helpless mirth from his eyes, he was lavishing more time and
attention on our songs than he needed to. Strictly against the company rules,
we worked on them late into the night, calling in favours from session
musicians Caleb knew, trying out arrangements and production ideas in
secret, after everyone else from DJM had gone home.

It was thrilling, until we got caught by the company’s office manager. I
can’t remember how he found out we were there — I think someone might
have driven past and seen a light on and thought the place was being burgled.
Caleb thought he was going to lose his job and, possibly out of desperation,
played Dick James himself what we’d been doing. Instead of firing Caleb and
throwing us out, Dick James offered to publish our songs. He was going to
give us a retainer of £25 a week: a tenner for Bernie and fifteen quid for me —
I got an extra fiver because I had to play piano and sing on the demos. It
meant I could quit Bluesology and concentrate on songwriting, which was
exactly what I wanted to do. We walked out of his office in a daze, too
dumbfounded to be excited.

The only downside of this new arrangement was that Dick thought our
future lay with the ballads and bubblegum pop. He worked with The Beatles,
administering their publishing company Northern Songs, but at heart he was
an old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley publisher. DJM was a strange set-up. Half the
company was like Dick himself: middle-aged, more from that old Jewish
showbiz world than rock and roll. The other half was younger and more
fashionable, like Caleb, and Dick’s son Stephen, or Tony King.

Tony King worked for a new company called AIR from a desk he rented
on the second floor. AIR was an association of independent record producers
that George Martin had started after he realized how badly EMI paid him for

working on The Beatles’ records, and Tony dealt with their publishing and
promotion. To say Tony stood out in the DJM offices was an understatement.
Tony would have attracted attention in the middle of a Martian invasion. He
wore suits from the hippest tailors in London: orange velvet trousers, things
made out of satin. He had strings of love beads around his neck and one or
more of his collection of antique silk scarves fluttered behind him. His hair
was dyed with blond highlights. He was an obsessive music fan, who’d
worked for The Rolling Stones and Roy Orbison. He was friends with The
Beatles. Like Long John Baldry, he was openly gay and he couldn’t care less
who knew it. He didn’t walk so much as waft through the office: ‘Sorry I’m
late, dear, the telephone got tangled up in my necklaces.’ He was hilarious. I
was completely fascinated by him. More than that: I wanted to be like him. I
wanted to be that stylish and outrageous and exotic.

His dress sense started to influence my own, with some eyebrow-raising
results. I grew a moustache. I bought an Afghan coat, but opted for the
cheaper kind. The sheepskin wasn’t cured properly and the ensuing stench
was so bad my mother wouldn’t let me in the flat if I was wearing it. Unable
to stretch to the kind of boutiques Tony shopped at, I bought a length of
curtain fabric with drawings of Noddy on it and got a seamstress friend of my
mum’s to make me a shirt out of it. For the adverts for my first single, ‘I’ve
Been Loving You’, I wore a fake fur coat and a mock-leopardskin trilby hat.

For some reason, the sight of me clad in this striking ensemble failed to
galvanize record buyers into the shops when the single was released in March
1968. It was a total flop. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t even disappointed. I
didn’t particularly want to be a solo artist — I just wanted to write songs — and
my record deal had come about more or less by accident. Dick’s son Stephen
had been shopping demos of our songs around various labels in the hope that
one of their artists would record them, someone at Philips had said they liked
my voice and the next thing I knew, I had a deal to put out a few singles. I
wasn’t sure at all, but I went along with it because I thought it might be one
way of getting some exposure for the songs Bernie and I were writing. We
were really improving as songwriters. We had been inspired by The Band’s
rootsy Americana, and by a new wave of US singer-songwriters like Leonard
Cohen, who we’d discovered in the imports section of Musicland. Something

about their influence clicked with our writing. We’d started coming up with
stuff that didn’t feel like pastiches of other people’s work. I’d listened to a
song we’d written called ‘Skyline Pigeon’ over and over again and,
thrillingly, I still couldn’t think of anyone else it sounded like — we’d finally
made something that was our own.

But Dick James had picked out ‘I’ve Been Loving You’ as my debut
single, apparently after a long but ultimately fruitful search to find the most
boring song in my catalogue. He managed to unearth something completely
nondescript that Bernie hadn’t even written the lyrics for, one that we’d
earmarked for sale to a middle-of-the-road crooner. I suppose it was Dick’s
old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley roots showing. I knew it was the wrong choice,
but I didn’t feel like arguing. He was the Denmark Street legend who worked
with The Beatles, and he’d given us a contract and got me a record deal when
he should have thrown Bernie and me out on the street. The adverts claimed
it was ‘the greatest performance on a “first” disc’, that I was ‘1968’s great
new talent’ and concluded, ‘YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED’. The British
public reacted as if they’d been warned every copy was contaminated with
raw sewage; 1968’s great new talent went back to the drawing board.

we oe

There was one further, unexpected complication in my life at this point. I’d
got engaged, to a woman called Linda Woodrow. We’d met in late 1967, at a
gig Bluesology played at Sheffield’s Mojo club. Linda was friends with the
club’s resident DJ, who was four foot eight and called himself the Mighty
Atom. She was tall, blonde and three years older than me. She didn’t have a
job. I don’t know where her money came from — I assumed her family were
wealthy — but she was a woman of independent means. She was very sweet,
interested in what I was doing. A post-gig conversation had turned into a
meeting that felt suspiciously like a date, which had turned into another date,
which had led to her coming down to visit Frome Court. It was an odd
relationship. There wasn’t much in the way of physicality, and we certainly
never had sex, which Linda took as evidence of old-fashioned chivalry and
romance on my part, rather than a lack of interest or willingness: in 1968 it
still wasn’t that unusual for couples not to sleep together before they were

married.

But sexual or not, the relationship started to develop a momentum of its
own. Linda decided to move to London and find a flat. Linda could afford
one, and so we could move in together. Bernie could be our lodger.

I'd be lying if I said I didn’t feel a sense of unease at all this, not least
because Linda had started expressing misgivings about the music I was
making. She was a big fan of an American crooner called Buddy Greco, and
made it fairly clear she thought I would be better off modelling myself on
him. But my unease was surprisingly easy to drown out. I liked the idea of
moving out of Frome Court. And I suppose I was doing what I thought I
should be doing at twenty — settling down with someone.

And so we ended up in a flat in Furlong Road, Islington: me, Bernie,
Linda and her pet Chihuahua, Caspar. She got a job as a secretary, and the
conversation increasingly turned to getting engaged. By now, the sound of
alarm bells was hard to ignore, because the people closest to me kept ringing
them. My mother was dead set against the idea, and you can get a pretty good
sense of what Bernie thought from the lyrics of the song he subsequently
wrote about that period, ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’. It’s hardly a
glowing appraisal of Linda’s multitude of good qualities: ‘a dominating
queen’, ‘sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair’. Bernie didn’t
like her at all. He thought she was going to screw up our music with all this
stuff about Buddy Greco. He thought she was bossy — he was furious that, for
some reason, she’d made him take down a Simon and Garfunkel poster he’d
put up in his room.

A cocktail of stubbornness and my aversion to confrontation enabled me
to blot the alarm bells out. We got engaged on my twenty-first birthday — I
can’t remember who asked who. A wedding date was set. Arrangements were
being made. I started to panic. The obvious course of action was simply to be
honest. But the obvious course of action didn’t appeal — actually telling Linda
how I felt was beyond me. So I decided to stage a suicide bid instead.

Bernie, who came to my rescue, has never let me forget the exact details
of my supposed attempt to end it all by gassing myself. Someone who really
wants to kill themselves will commit the act in solitude, so as not to be
stopped; they’ ll do it at the dead of night, or in a place where they’re alone. I,

on the other hand, did it in the middle of the afternoon in a flat full of people:
Bernie was in his bedroom, Linda was having a nap. I’d not only put a pillow
in the bottom of the oven to rest my head on, I’d taken the precaution of
turning the gas to low and opening all the windows in the kitchen. It
momentarily seemed quite dramatic when Bernie hauled me out of the oven,
but there wasn’t enough carbon monoxide in the room to kill a wasp. I’d
expected the reaction to be one of terrible shock, followed by a sudden
realization on Linda’s part that my suicidal despair was rooted in unhappiness
at our impending marriage. Instead the reaction was mild bemusement.
Worse, Linda seemed to think that if I was depressed, it was because of the
failure of ‘I’ve Been Loving You’ to light up the charts. Clearly, this would
have been an ideal moment to tell her the truth. Instead, I said nothing. The
suicide bid was forgotten, and the wedding remained in the diary. We started
looking for a flat together in Mill Hill.

It took Long John Baldry to spell out what I already knew. We’d stayed
good friends after my departure from Bluesology, and I had asked him to be
my best man at the wedding. He seemed quietly entertained by the idea that I
was getting married at all, but agreed. We arranged to meet at the Bag O”
Nails club in Soho to talk over the details. Bernie tagged along.

There was something strange about John’s mood from the minute that he
arrived. He appeared preoccupied. I had no idea what with. I assumed
something was going on in his personal life. Perhaps Ozzie had declined to
spin around on his dick, or whatever it was they did in private. It took a few
drinks until he told me what the problem was, in no uncertain terms.

‘Oh, fucking hell,’ he erupted. ‘What are you doing living with a fucking
woman? Wake up and smell the roses. You’re gay. You love Bernie more
than you love her.’

There was an awkward silence. I knew he was right, at least up to a point.
I didn’t love Linda, certainly not enough to marry her. I did love Bernie. Not
in a sexual way, but he was my best friend in the world. I certainly cared far
more about our musical partnership than I did about my fiancée. But gay? I
wasn’t sure about that at all, largely because I still wasn’t 100 per cent certain
what being gay entailed, although thanks to a few frank conversations with
Tony King I was getting a better idea. Maybe I was gay. Maybe that’s why I

admired Tony so much — I didn’t just want to emulate his clothes and his
sense of urbane sophistication, I saw something of myself in him.

It was a lot to mull over. Instead of doing that, I argued back. John was
being ridiculous. He was drunk — yet again — and making a fuss about
nothing. I couldn’t possibly cancel the wedding. Everything was arranged.
We’d ordered a cake.

But John wouldn’t listen. He kept on at me. I’d ruin my life and Linda’s
too if I went through with it. I was a fucking idiot, and a coward to boot. As
the conversation got more heated and emotional, it began attracting attention.
People from adjoining tables became involved. Because it was the Bag O’
Nails, the people from adjoining tables all happened to be pop stars, which
lent everything an increasingly surreal edge. Cindy Birdsong from The
Supremes chipped in — I’d known her back in the Bluesology days, when
she’d been one of Patti LaBelle’s Blue Belles. Then, somehow, P. J. Proby
became embroiled in the conversation. I’d love to be able to tell you what the
trouser-splitting, ponytail-wearing enfant terrible of mid-sixties pop had to
say regarding my impending wedding, its potential cancellation and, indeed,
whether or not I was a homosexual, but by then I was incredibly pissed, and
the exact details are a little hazy, although at some point I must have given in
and conceded that John was right, at least about the marriage.

In my memory, the rest of the night plays out in fractured images.
Walking up the road to the flat as dawn was breaking — arm in arm with
Bernie, for moral support — and the pair of us stumbling against cars and
knocking dustbins over. A terrible row, during which Linda threatened to kill
herself. A slurred conversation held through the locked door of Bernie’s
room — he’d made himself very scarce shortly after our arrival — about
whether or not we thought Linda was actually going to kill herself. Another
conversation through Bernie’s door, asking if he’d mind unlocking it so I
could sleep on the floor.

The next morning there was another row, and a desperate phone call to
Frome Court. “They’re coming in the morning with a truck to take me home,’
Bernie wrote in ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’. That was a bit of poetic
licence. There was no ‘they’ and no truck: only Derf in his little decorator’s
van. But Bernie and I did get taken home. Back to the bunk beds in Frome

Court we went. Bernie stuck his Simon and Garfunkel poster on the wall.
Neither of us ever saw Linda again.

three

In theory, Bernie and I were only back in Frome Court temporarily, until we
found somewhere of our own. It slowly sank in that, in reality, we were going
to be there for the foreseeable future. We wouldn’t be getting anywhere of
our own, because we couldn’t afford anywhere of our own. We couldn’t
afford anywhere of our own because Britain’s singers continued to prove
implacably opposed to recording our songs. Occasionally, word would reach
us that an artist’s manager or producer was interested in something we’d
written. You would get your hopes up and then ... nothing. The rejections
piled up. It’s a no from Cliff, I’m afraid. Sorry, Cilla doesn’t think it’s quite
right for her. No, Octopus don’t want ‘When I Was Tealby Abbey’. Octopus?
Who the hell were Octopus? Literally the only thing I knew about them was
that they didn’t like our songs. We were being turned down by people we’d
never even heard of.

Nothing was moving. Nothing was happening. It was hard not to get
dispirited, although one advantage of living at Frome Court was that my mum
was always on hand, armed with her patent method of snapping me out of
despair. This involved a straight-faced suggestion that I abandon my
songwriting career and go and work in a local shop instead: ‘Well, you’ve got
a choice, you know. There’s a job going in the launderette, if you like.’ The
launderette, you say? Hmm. Delightful as a career manning the tumble dryers
sounds, I think I’ll stick with songwriting for a bit longer.

So instead of moving out, we tried to make a bedroom with bunks in it
look like an acceptable place for two grown men to live. I joined a Reader’s
Digest book club and gradually filled up the shelves with leather-bound

editions of Moby Dick and David Copperfield. We got a stereo and two sets
of headphones out of the Littlewoods catalogue — we could afford them
because you paid in instalments. We bought a Man Ray poster from Athena
in Oxford Street, then went next door to a shop called India Craft and bought
some joss sticks. Lying on the floor, with our headphones on, our latest
purchase from Musicland on the turntable and the air heady with incense
smoke, Bernie and I could momentarily convince ourselves that we were
artists living a bohemian existence at the cutting edge of the counterculture.
Or at least we could until the spell was broken by my mum knocking on the
bedroom door, asking to know what that bleedin’ smell was and, by the way,
what did we want for our dinner?

I had a little more money than Bernie, because Tony King had used his
connections at AIR Studios and Abbey Road to get me work as a session
musician. You got £3 an hour for a three-hour session, paid in cash if you
were working at Abbey Road. Better yet, if the session went even a minute
over the allotted time, the Musicians’ Union rules meant that you got paid for
a session and a half: nearly fifteen quid, the same as I earned in a week at
DJM. The final bonus would be if I bumped into Shirley Burns and Carol
Weston, the AIR Studios secretaries. They were so fabulous, always ready
for a gossip, always happy to suggest my name if they heard of a job going.
Something about me apparently brought out the maternal instinct in them,
and they would quietly slip me their luncheon vouchers. So that meant a free
meal on top of everything else — I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

But forget the money: the session work was a fantastic experience. A
session musician can’t afford to be picky. Whenever work came in, whatever
work it was, you accepted it. You had to work quickly and you had to be on
point, because your fellow session players were some of the best musicians in
the country. Frightening isn’t an adjective you would normally associate with
the Mike Sammes Singers, who did backing vocals for everyone — they
looked like middle-aged aunties and uncles who’d arrived at the studio direct
from a golf club dinner dance. But if you had to sing alongside them, they
suddenly struck the fear of God into you, because they were so good at what
they did.

And you had to be adaptable, because you were expected to play an

incredible variety of music. One day you’d be singing backing vocals for
Tom Jones, the next you’d be making a comedy record with The Scaffold, or
arranging and playing piano with The Hollies, or trying to come up with a
rock version of the theme from Zorba the Greek for The Bread and Beer
Band, a project of Tony King’s that never really got off the ground. You
constantly met new people and made new contacts: musicians, producers,
arrangers, record company staff. One day, I was recording with The Barron
Knights when Paul McCartney suddenly walked into the studio. He sat in the
control room and listened for a while. Then he went to the piano, announced
that this was what he was doing in a studio nearby, and played ‘Hey Jude’ for
eight minutes. That certainly threw what The Barron Knights were doing —
making a novelty record about Des O’Connor taking part in the Olympic
Games — into quite stark relief.

Sometimes a session was great because the music you were playing was
incredible, but sometimes a session was great because the music you were
playing was so terrible. I did a lot of covers albums for a label called Marble
Arch: hastily knocked-out versions of current chart hits, released on
compilations with titles like Top of the Pops, Hit Parade and Chartbusters,
that were sold cheaply in supermarkets. Whenever my involvement in them
comes up, people talk about it as a desperate low point in my career: the poor,
undiscovered artist, reduced to anonymously singing other people’s songs in
order to earn a crust. I suppose you could look at it like that with the benefit
of hindsight, but it certainly didn’t feel that way at the time, because the
sessions for the covers albums were screamingly, howlingly funny.

The instructions you would get from the producer Alan Caddy were
fantastic — one completely insane request after another. ‘Can you sing
“Young, Gifted And Black”?’ Well, that’s not a song that makes an
enormous amount of sense sung by a white guy from Pinner, but I’ll give it a
go. ‘We’re doing “Back Home” next — we need you to sound like the
England World Cup Squad.’ OK, there’s only three singers here and one of
us is female, so it’s probably not going to sound indistinguishable from the
original, but you’re the boss. On one occasion, I was required to sound like
Robin Gibb of The Bee Gees, a great singer but a man possessed of a unique
vocal style: a kind of eerie, tremulous, nasal vibrato. I couldn’t do it, unless I

physically grabbed hold of my throat and wobbled it around while I was
singing. I thought this was a real brainwave, but it caused absolute
pandemonium among my fellow musicians. I stood there, wailing away,
fingers clasped round my neck, desperately trying not to look across the
studio, where the other session singers, David Byron and Dana Gillespie,
were clinging on to each other and weeping with laughter.

Here’s how much I enjoyed the sessions for the covers albums, this
supposedly lamentable artistic nadir in my professional life: I went back and
did one after my solo career took off. I assure you I’m not making this up.
“Your Song’ was written, the Elton John album was out, I’d been on Top of
the Pops, I was about to go to America for my first tour, and I went back into
the studio and happily belted out shonky versions of ‘In The Summertime’
and ‘Let’s Work Together’ for some terrible album sold in a supermarket for
fourteen and sixpence. It was, as usual, a hoot.

But the session work was far from the most important thing about my
friendship with Tony King. He had a great circle of friends, like a little gang,
mostly made up of gay men who worked in the music business. They were
record producers, men who worked at the BBC, promoters and pluggers, and
a Scottish guy called John Reid, who was young, ambitious, very confident
and very funny. He was advancing through the music industry at an
incredible rate. Eventually he was made the UK label manager for Tamla
Motown, dealing with The Supremes, The Temptations and Smokey
Robinson, a prestigious appointment that Tony commemorated with suitable
gravitas by always referring to John thereafter as Pamela Motown.

Tony’s group weren’t particularly wild or outrageous — they had dinner
parties, or went out to restaurants and pubs together, rather than haunting
London’s gay clubs — but I just loved their company. They were sophisticated
and smart and very, very funny: I adored that camp sense of humour. The
more I thought about it, the more I realized there was something odd about
how completely at home I felt when I was with them. I’d never been a loner,
I’d always had lots of friends — at school, in Bluesology, in Denmark Street —
but this was different, more like a sense of belonging. I felt like one of the
kids in Mary Poppins, suddenly being exposed to this magical new world.
Twelve months after John Baldry had drunkenly announced that I was gay to

everyone within earshot at the Bag O’ Nails, I decided he was right.

As if to underline the point, my libido unexpectedly decided to show its
face for the first time, like a flustered latecomer to a party that was supposed
to have started ten years ago. At twenty-one, I suddenly seemed to be
undergoing some kind of belated adolescence. There were suddenly a lot of
quiet crushes on men. It clearly wasn’t just his sense of humour and extensive
knowledge of American soul that made me find John Reid so captivating, for
one. Of course, I never acted on any of them. I wouldn’t have known how.
I’d never knowingly chatted anyone up in my life. I’d never been to a gay
club. I had no idea how you picked someone up. What was I supposed to say?
‘Do you want to come to the cinema with me and maybe get your knob out
later’? That’s the main memory I have of the reality of my sexuality dawning
on me. I don’t recall feeling anxious or tormented. I just remember wanting
to have sex, having absolutely no idea how to do it and feeling terrified that I
might get it wrong. I never even told Tony I was gay.

Besides, I had other things on my mind. One morning, Bernie and I were
called into a meeting at DJM with Steve Brown, who’d recently taken over
from Caleb as the studio manager. He told us he’d listened to the songs we
had been recording and thought we were wasting our time.

“You need to stop this rubbish. You’re not very good at it. In fact,’ he
nodded, clearly warming to this disheartening theme, ‘you’re hopeless.
You’re never going to make it as songwriters. You can’t do it at all.’

I sat there reeling. Oh, wonderful. This is it. The Northwood Hills
launderette beckons. Maybe not; there was always the session work. But what
about Bernie? The poor sod was going to end up back in Owmby-by-Spital,
pushing his wheelbarrow full of dead chickens around again, the only
evidence that he’d ever had a career in music one flop single he didn’t
actually write and a rejection note from Octopus, whoever they were. We
hadn’t even paid off the HP on the stereo.

As my mind raced, I became aware that elsewhere in the room, Steve
Brown was still talking. He was saying something about ‘Lady What’s
Tomorrow’, one of the songs we’d written that we hadn’t even bothered to
try and sell. It was influenced by Leonard Cohen, and clearly Cilla Black
wasn’t going to be interested. But Steve Brown apparently was.

“You need to write more songs like that,’ he continued. ‘You need to do
what you want to do, not what you think will sell. ’m going to talk to Dick
and see if we can make an album.’

Afterwards, Bernie and I sat in the pub, trying to process what had just
happened. On the one hand, I didn’t have any great ambitions to be a solo
artist. On the other, the opportunity to stop writing the weepies and
bubblegum pop was too good to turn down. And we still thought releasing
Elton John records was a good way of showcasing the kind of songs we liked.
The more exposure our songs got, the more likely it was that another, more
famous artist might hear them and decide to record one themselves.

There was one problem. The deal with Philips was for singles: they
wanted a follow-up to ‘I’ve Been Loving You’, not an album. So Steve
Brown recorded a new song that Bernie and I had written, following his
instruction to stop trying to be commercial and do what we liked. It was
called ‘Lady Samantha’, and it felt like a breakthrough. Admittedly, at this
stage of my career, making a single that I could listen to without emitting an
involuntary yell of horror would have constituted a breakthrough, but ‘Lady
Samantha’ was a pretty good song. It sounded completely different from
‘I’ve Been Loving You’: it was weightier, hipper, more confident. Released
in January 1969, it became what used to be called a ‘turntable hit’, which was
a polite way of saying it was a single that got played on the radio a lot but no
one actually bought.

In the aftermath of its failure, we discovered Philips weren’t interested in
renewing our deal: for some inexplicable reason, they seemed very resistant
to financing an album by an artist who’d so far done nothing but lose them
money. Dick James vaguely mentioned putting it out himself, setting up a
proper label, rather than just licensing recordings out to other record
companies, but he seemed more keen on talking about the Eurovision Song
Contest. Much to Dick’s delight, one of the attempts at middle-of-the-road
songwriting we were supposed to have forgotten about had now been mooted
as a potential UK entry. Lulu was going to sing six songs on her TV show
and the British public were going to vote for a winner. To say Bernie greeted
this news coolly was an understatement. He was appalled. Back then,
Eurovision wasn’t quite the orgy of embarrassment it is now, but still, it

wasn’t like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine were queuing up to get involved.
Worse, he hadn’t actually had anything to do with the song, even though it
had his name on the credits. I’d knocked together the lyrics myself. It was
‘I’ve Been Loving You’ all over again. We were suddenly back where we
started.

Bermie’s worst fears were confirmed when we sat down in Frome Court to
watch the Lulu show. Our song — my song — was completely undistinguished
and forgettable, which was more than you could say for the rest of them.
Every other songwriter seemed to have come up with an idea so horrendous
you couldn’t forget it if you tried. One was like something drunk Germans
would slap their knees to in a Bavarian beer hall. Another featured the
appalling combination of a big band and a bouzouki. Another was called
‘March’. The title didn’t refer to the month. The song was literally about
marching, with an arrangement featuring a military brass band to ram home
the point. Steve Brown was right. We really couldn’t do this kind of thing at
all, a fact underlined when our song came last in the public vote. The German
oompah song won. It was called ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’.

The next day, we arrived at DJM to discover that the Daily Express had
published an article helpfully explaining that our song had lost because it was
self-evidently the worst of the lot. Dick wearily conceded that perhaps it
might be better if we stopped wasting everybody’s time and made our own
album instead. If Philips wouldn’t release it, then he would hire a press and
promotions guy and start his own record label after all.

So we were sequestered in the litthke DJM studio, with Steve Brown
producing and Clive Franks operating the tape machine. Clive was the guy
who recorded The Troggs Tape; years later, he ended up co-producing some
of my albums, and he still works with me today, doing the sound engineering
for my live shows. We collectively threw everything we could at the new
songs. Psychedelic sound effects, harpsichords, backwards guitar solos
courtesy of Caleb, flutes, bongos, stereo panning, improvised jazz interludes,
trick endings where the songs faded out then suddenly back in again, the
sound of Clive whistling. If you listened carefully, you could hear the kitchen
sink being dragged into the studio. We might have been better off had we
realized less is sometimes more, but you don’t think like that when you’re

making your first album. There’s a faint voice at the back of your mind
telling you that you might never make another, so you may as well try
everything while you have the chance. But, God, it was so much fun, such an
adventure. The album was called Empty Sky. It came out on Dick’s new DJM
label on 6 June 1969. I can remember listening back to the title track and
thinking it was the greatest thing I’d ever heard in my life.

Empty Sky wasn’t a hit — it only sold a few thousand copies — but I could
still sense things were starting to move, very gradually. The reviews were
promising rather than great, but they were definitely an improvement on
being told by the Daily Express that you couldn’t write a song as good as
‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’. Just as the album was released, we got a phone call to
say that Three Dog Night had covered ‘Lady Samantha’ on their new album.
Three Dog Night! They were American! An actual American rock band had
recorded one of our songs. Not a light entertainer with a Saturday-night
variety show on BBC1, not an entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest: a hip,
successful American rock band. Bernie and I had a song on an album that
was in the US Top Twenty.

And Empty Sky gave me material, which meant I could play live. The first
gigs were pretty tentative. They were little pop-up shows; I was playing with
any musicians I could find — usually Caleb and his new band Hookfoot — and
I was still nervous: the last time I had been onstage, Long John Baldry had
his tape recorder out and I was in a kaftan, suffering a complete collapse of
the will to live. But the gigs got better the more comfortable I felt, and they
really took off when I assembled my own band. I had met Nigel Olsson and
Dee Murray lurking around DJM. Nigel was playing with a band called
Plastic Penny, who had a big hit single in 1968 and, incredibly, had actually
bought one of the songs Bernie and I had been trying to sell the previous
year. It somehow seemed symbolic of our luck that they recorded it on an
album that was released just as Plastic Penny’s moment in the spotlight
passed and their career went down the toilet. Dee, meanwhile, had been in
The Mirage, a psychedelic band who released singles for years without
getting anywhere. They were fantastic musicians and we clicked straight
away. Dee was an incredible bass player. Nigel was a drummer from the
Keith Moon and Ginger Baker school, a showman with a kit that took up

most of our rehearsal space and had his name emblazoned across his twin
bass drums. They could both sing. We didn’t need a guitarist. The sound the
three of us made was already huge and raw. Plus, there’s something about
performing in a trio that gives you a real freedom to play off the cuff. It
didn’t matter that we couldn’t replicate the tricky arrangements of the album:
instead we could stretch out and improvise, play solos, tur songs into
medleys, suddenly launch into an old Elvis cover or a version of ‘Give Peace
A Chance’.

I started to think more about how I looked onstage. I wanted to be a
frontman, but I was trapped behind a piano. I couldn’t strut around like Mick
Jagger, or smash my instrument up like Jimi Hendrix or Pete Townshend:
bitter subsequent experience has taught me that if you get carried away and
try and smash up a piano by pushing it offstage, you end up looking less like
a lawless rock god and more like a furniture removal man having a bad day.
So I thought about the piano players I’d loved as a kid, how they had
managed to communicate excitement while stuck behind the old nine-foot
plank, as I affectionately called it. I thought of Jerry Lee Lewis kicking his
stool away and jumping on the keyboard, how Little Richard stood up and
leaned back when he played, even the way Winifred Atwell would turn to the
audience and grin. They all influenced my performances. It turned out that
playing the piano standing up like Little Richard is bloody hard work when
you have arms as short as mine, but I persevered. We didn’t sound like
anyone else, and now we didn’t look like anyone else either. Whatever else
might have been happening in pop as the sixties turned into the seventies, I
was fairly certain there weren’t any other piano-led power trios whose
frontman was trying to mix the outrageousness and aggression of early rock
and roll with Winifred Atwell’s bonhomie.

As we toured around colleges and hippy venues like the Roundhouse, the
gigs got wilder and the music got better, especially when we started playing
the latest batch of songs Bernie and I had come up with. I confess, I’m not
always the best judge of my own work — I am, after all, the man who loudly
announced that ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ was such a terrible
song that I would never countenance releasing it, of which more later — but
even I could tell that our new material was in a different league to anything

we'd produced before. They were easy songs to write — Bernie got the lyrics
to ‘Your Song’ over breakfast one morning in Frome Court, handed them to
me and I wrote the music in fifteen minutes flat — because, in a way, we’d
already done all the hard work. The way they sounded was the culmination of
the hours we’d previously put in trying to write together, the gigs I’d been
playing with Nigel and Dee that had boosted my confidence, the years I’d
spent at the Royal Academy much against my will, the nights on the club
circuit in Bluesology. Something like ‘Border Song’ or ‘Take Me To The
Pilot’ had a sort of funk and soulfulness that I’d picked up backing Patti
LaBelle and Major Lance, but they also had a classical influence that seeped
in from all those Saturday mornings where I’d been forced to study Chopin
and Bartok.

They were also the product of the bedroom at Frome Court. At the time
we were writing, two artists were constantly on the Littlewoods stereo. One
was the rock/soul duo Delaney and Bonnie. I was completely obsessed with
the way their keyboardist, Leon Russell, played. It was like he’d somehow
climbed into my head and worked out exactly how I wanted to play piano
before I did. He’d managed to synthesize all the music I loved — rock and
roll, blues, gospel, country — into one, perfectly natural style.

And the other was The Band. We played their first two albums over and
over again. Like Leon Russell’s piano playing, their songs felt like someone
switching a torch on and showing us a new path to follow, a way we could do
what we wanted to do. ‘Chest Fever’, ‘Tears Of Rage’, ‘The Weight’: this
was what we craved to write. Bernie went crazy for the lyrics. Ever since he
was a kid, he’d loved gritty stories about old America, and that was what The
Band told: ‘Virgil Caine is the name and I served on the Danville train, ‘til
Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore the tracks up again’. They were white
musicians making soul music without covering ‘In The Midnight Hour’, or
doing something that was just a pale imitation of what black artists did. It was
a revelation.

When we played Dick the demos of the new songs, he was knocked out.
Despite the sales of Empty Sky, he said he wanted another album. What’s
more, he was going to give us £6,000 to make it. That was a remarkable leap
of faith. It was an incredible amount of money to spend on an album in those

days, especially one by an artist who had barely sold any records yet. There’s
no doubting the belief Dick had in us, but I think his hand may also have
been forced a little. Bernie and I had become friends with Muff Winwood,
Stevie’s brother, who worked for Island Records and lived not far from
Frome Court — I think we literally bumped into him on a train back to Pinner
one day. We would go round to his house a couple of nights a week with a
bottle of Mateus Rosé and a box of chocolates for his wife Zena — very
sophisticated — play table football or Monopoly and pump Muff for advice
about the music business. When he heard the new songs, he was really
enthusiastic, and wanted to sign us to Island, a much bigger and cooler label
than DJM. Word of a competitor got back to Dick, which might have
galvanized him into getting his chequebook out.

Whatever the reason, the money meant we could move out of DJM into a
proper studio, Trident in Soho. Steve Brown suggested we should get an
outside producer: Gus Dudgeon, who’d produced David Bowie’s ‘Space
Oddity’, a number one single that we all loved the sound of. We could afford
strings and an arranger, Paul Buckmaster, who had worked on ‘Space Oddity’
too. Paul arrived looking like D’ Artagnan — he had long centre-parted hair, a
goatee beard and a big hat. He seemed a bit eccentric, which, as it turned out,
was a false first impression. Paul wasn’t a bit eccentric. He was so eccentric
as to suggest he might be genuinely nuts. He would stand in front of the
orchestra and make noises with his mouth to indicate what he wanted them to
do: ‘I don’t know how to describe what I want, but I want you to make a
sound like this.’ They got it exactly right. He was a genius.

But then everything about the sessions was weirdly magical. Me, Gus,
Steve and Paul had planned everything out in advance — the songs, the sound,
the arrangements — and it all just fell into place. I had barely touched a
harpsichord before we hired one for ‘I Need You To Turn To’; it was a really
hard instrument to play, but I did it. I was petrified about playing live with an
orchestra, but I psyched myself up, telling myself that this was it, something
was finally coming to fruition. All those crappy clubs with Long John Baldry
and his tape recorder, all the session work, Derf carrying his pint pot round
for tips at the Northwood Hills Hotel, Bernie and me escaping from Furlong
Road and Linda’s dreams of turning me into Buddy Greco: it was all leading

up to this. And it worked. The whole album was done in four days.

We knew we’d made something good, something that would push us on
to the next level. We were right. When it came out in April 1970 the reviews
of Elton John were fantastic; John Peel played it and it crept into the bottom
end of the charts. We started getting offers to play in Europe, although every
time we went there something bizarre seemed to happen. In Paris, some
genius booked us as the support act to Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66. An
audience expecting an evening of bossa nova showed their delight at having
their musical horizons unexpectedly broadened by booing us off. We turned
up in Knokke, Belgium to discover we weren’t playing a gig at all: it was a
televised song contest. We went to Holland to appear on a TV show and
instead of getting us to perform, they insisted on making a film of me ina
park, miming ‘Your Song’ into a microphone while surrounded, for some
reason, by actors pretending to be paparazzi taking my photograph. They still
show it on TV sometimes. I look absolutely furious, like I’m about to punch
somebody — a fairly accurate representation of how I felt, but not really the
ideal delivery for a tender ballad about blossoming love.

Back at home, though, a buzz was definitely building. In August, we
played the Krumlin Festival in Yorkshire, which should have been a disaster.
It was in a field in the middle of the moors. It was freezing cold, pouring with
rain and completely disorganized. The stage was still being built when the
festival was supposed to start, which gave the bands who were supposed to
play time to start squabbling over the running order. I couldn’t be bothered
getting involved with that, so we just went on, handed out brandy to the
crowd and tore the place apart while Atomic Rooster and The Pretty Things
were still backstage, arguing about who was the biggest star. I started seeing
famous faces in the audiences at our London shows, which meant that word
was getting about in the music business that we were worth checking out. A
couple of weeks before we played Krumlin, Pete Townshend from The Who
and Jeff Beck had turned up to our show at the Speakeasy club, which had
taken over from the Cromwellian and the Bag O’ Nails as London’s big
music industry hang-out. We got invited on Top of the Pops to play ‘Border
Song’: our appearance didn’t do much to help its sales as a single, but Dusty
Springfield introduced herself to us in the dressing room and offered to mime

backing vocals during our performance. My mouth just hung open. I’d
travelled to Harrow to see her live with The Springfields when I was still at
school, and hung around outside the stage door afterwards, just to get another
glimpse of her: she walked past in a lilac top and mauve skirt, looking
incredibly chic. I’d joined her fan club in the early sixties and stuck posters of
her on my bedroom wall.

The only obstacle to our progress was Dick, who had got it into his head
that we should go to America and play there. He had managed to sell the
album to a US label called Uni — a division of MCA — and kept talking about
how enthusiastic they were about it, how they wanted us to play some club
shows. I couldn’t see the point, and told him so. Something was starting to
happen in Britain. The gigs were great, the album was selling OK and Dusty
Springfield liked me. Bernie and I were writing song after song — we’d
already started working on demos for the next album. Why lose the
momentum by leaving now and going to America, where no one knew who I
was?

The more I argued, the more adamant Dick became that we should go.
But then I was handed a lifeline. After the Speakeasy show, Jeff Beck had
invited me along to his rehearsal space in Chalk Farm to jam. Then his agent
set up a Meeting at DJM. Jeff effectively wanted to use me, Dee and Nigel as
his backing band for an American tour. I would get a solo spot during the set,
where I could play my own songs. It seemed like an incredible offer. Jeff
Beck was one of the greatest guitar players I’d ever seen. His last album,
Beck-Ola, had been a huge hit. Admittedly, we were only to get 10 per cent
of the nightly earnings, but 10 per cent of Jeff Beck’s earnings was still a lot
more than we were making now. And the important thing was the exposure.
These would be big audiences, and I’d be playing my songs in front of them
—not as a completely unknown artist, but as part of Jeff Beck’s band; not as a
support act that everyone could ignore, but in the middle of the main set.

I was ready to ask them where to sign when Dick told Beck’s agent to
stuff their 10 per cent. What was he doing? I tried to catch his eye, in order to
wordlessly communicate that he should consider the wisdom of shutting up
immediately. He didn’t look at me. The agent said the deal was non-
negotiable. Dick shrugged.

‘I promise you now,’ he said, ‘that in six months’ time, Elton John will be
earning twice what Jeff Beck does.’

What? Dick, you fucking idiot. What did you have to say that for? It
sounded remarkably like a statement that was going to follow me around for
the rest of my career. I could see myself in five years’ time, still slogging
around the clubs, The Guy Who Was Going To Earn Twice What Jeff Beck
Does. The agent swiftly disappeared — he was probably in a hurry to inform
the rest of the music industry that Dick James had lost his marbles — but Dick
was completely unrepentant. I didn’t need Jeff Beck. I should go to America
on my own. The songs on Elton John were great. The band was fantastic live.
The US record label were behind us all the way. They were going to pull out
all the stops to promote us. One day I’d thank him for this.

Back at Frome Court, I talked it over with Bernie. He suggested we
should think of it as a holiday. We could visit places we had only seen on TV
or in films — 77 Sunset Strip, the Beverly Hillbillies’ mansion. We could go
to Disneyland. We could go record shopping. Besides, the US record label
were going to pull out all the stops. We’d probably be met at the airport by a
limousine. Maybe a Cadillac. A Cadillac!

we

We stood blinking in the Los Angeles sunshine, a little cluster of us — me and
Bernie, Dee and Nigel, Steve Brown and Ray Williams, who DJM had
appointed my manager, our roadie Bob and David Larkham, who’d designed
the covers for Empty Sky and Elton John. We were befuddled by jet lag and
trying to work out why there was a bright red London bus parked outside
LAX Airport. A bright red London bus with my name painted on the side of
it! ELTON JOHN HAS ARRIVED. A bright red London bus that our excited
American publicist, Norman Winter, was currently urging us to get on board.
Bernie and I exchanged a dismayed glance: oh, for fuck’s sake, this is our
limo, isn’t it?

You have no idea how slowly a London Routemaster bus goes until
you’ve travelled on one from LAX to Sunset Boulevard. It took us two and a
half hours, partly because the thing had a top speed of about forty miles an
hour, and partly because we had to take the scenic route — they wouldn’t

allow a double-decker on the freeway. Out of the corner of my eye, I could
see Bernie gradually sliding down in his seat, until he couldn’t be seen from
outside the window, presumably in case Bob Dylan or a member of The Band
happened to drive past and laugh at him.

This really wasn’t how I’d expected our arrival in California to pan out.
Were it not for the fact that I could see palm trees out of the window and the
bus was filled with Americans — the staff of Uni Records — I might as well
have been on the 38 to Clapton Pond. It was my first experience of the
difference between British record companies and US ones. In Britain, no
matter how much your label loves you, no matter how passionate they are
about working on your album, it’s always tempered by a certain reserve, a
national tendency to understatement and dry humour. That clearly wasn’t the
case in America: it was just non-stop enthusiasm, a completely different kind
of energy. No one had ever talked to me the way Norman Winter was talking
— ‘this is gonna be huge, we’ve done this, we’ve done that, Odetta’s coming
to the show, Bread are coming to the show, The Beach Boys are coming to
the show, it’s gonna be incredible’. No one had ever talked to me as much as
Norman Winter was talking: as far as I could tell, his mouth hadn’t actually
stopped moving since he’d introduced himself in the arrivals lounge. It was
simultaneously startling and weirdly exhilarating.

And everything he said turned out to be completely true. Norman Winter
and his promotions department had done this and done that: got LA record
stores to stock the album and display posters, lined up interviews, invited
umpteen stars to see the show. Someone had convinced my Uni labelmate
Neil Diamond to get onstage and introduce me. I was headlining over David
Ackles, which seemed completely ridiculous.

‘But David Ackles is on Elektra,’ protested Bernie weakly, remembering
the hours we’d spent in Frome Court listening to his debut album and
discussing the incomparable West Coast hipness of the label that had released
it: Elektra, run by the great Jac Holzman, home to The Doors and Love, Tim
Buckley and Delaney and Bonnie.

It was fantastic work from a passionate and committed team who had
used every bit of their expertise in creating hype. They had miraculously
turned a show by an unknown artist at a 300-capacity club into an event. And

it certainly had a profound knock-on effect on me. Before, I’d been dubious
about the idea of playing in America. Now, I was absolutely terrified. When
everybody else went on a day trip to Palm Springs, arranged by Ray, I wisely
elected to remain at the hotel alone, in order to concentrate on the pressing
business of panicking about the gig. The more I panicked, the more furious I
got. How dare they all go to Palm Springs and enjoy themselves, when they
should have been back at the hotel with me, pointlessly worrying themselves
sick? In the absence of anybody to shout at in person, I rang Dick James in
London and shouted at him. I was coming back to England. Now. They could
stick their gig and their star-studded guest list and their onstage introduction
from Neil Diamond up their arses. It took all Dick’s powers of avuncular
persuasion to stop me packing my suitcase. I decided to stay, dividing my
remaining time before the gig between record shopping and a little light
sulking whenever anyone mentioned Palm Springs.

I can remember two things very clearly about the first show we played at
the Troubadour. The first is that the applause as I walked onstage had a
slightly odd quality to it: it was accompanied by a kind of surprised murmur,
as if the audience were expecting someone else. In a way, I suppose they
were. The cover of the Elton John album is dark and sombre. The musicians
on the back are dressed down and hippyish — I’m wearing a black T-shirt and
a crocheted waistcoat. And that’s the guy they assumed they’d see: a
brooding, introspective singer-songwriter. But when I’d gone shopping for
new clothes a couple of weeks before I left for the States, I’d visited a clothes
shop in Chelsea called Mr Freedom, about which there was a real buzz
developing: the designer Tommy Roberts was letting his imagination run riot,
making clothes that looked like a cartoonist had drawn them. The stuff in the
window was so outrageous that I hung around on the pavement outside for
ages, trying to pluck up the courage to go in. Once I did, Tommy Roberts was
so friendly and enthusiastic that he talked me into buying a selection of
clothes not even Tony King would have countenanced wearing in public.
Wearing them, I felt different, like I was expressing a side of my personality
that I’d kept hidden, a desire to be outrageous and over-the-top. I suppose it
all went back to chancing on that photo of Elvis in the barber’s in Pinner
when I was a kid: I liked that sense of shock, of seeing a star who made you

wonder what the hell was going on. The clothes from Mr Freedom weren’t
outrageous because they were sexy or threatening, they were outrageous
because they were larger than life, more fun than the world around them. I
loved them. Before I went onstage at the Troubadour, I put them all on at
once. So instead of an introspective hippy singer-songwriter, the audience
were greeted by the sight of a man in bright yellow dungarees, a long-sleeved
T-shirt covered in stars and a pair of heavy workman’s boots, also bright
yellow, with a large set of blue wings sprouting from them. This was not the
way sensitive singer-songwriters in America in 1970 looked. This was not the
way anyone of sound mind in America in 1970 looked.

And the second thing I remember very clearly is peering out into the
crowd while we were playing and realizing, with a nasty start, that Leon
Russell was in the second row. I hadn’t spotted any of the galaxy of stars that
were supposed to be there, but you couldn’t miss him. He looked incredible,
a vast mane of silver hair and a long beard framing a mean, impassive face. I
couldn’t tear my eyes off him, even though looking at him made the bottom
fall out of my stomach. The gig had been going well up to that point — Dee
and Nigel sounded tight, we’d started to relax and stretch out the songs a
little. Now I suddenly felt as nervous as I had at the hotel on the day of the
Palm Springs trip. It was like one of those terrible nightmares where you’re
back at school, sitting a test, then realize that you’re not wearing any trousers
or underpants: you’re playing the most important gig of your career, then see
your idol in the audience, glaring at you, stony-faced.

I had to pull myself together. I had to do something to take my mind off
the fact that Leon Russell was watching me. I jumped to my feet and kicked
my piano stool away. I stood there, knees bent, pounding at the keys like
Little Richard. I dropped to the floor, balancing on one hand and playing with
the other, my head under the piano. Then I stood up, threw myself forward
and did a handstand on the keyboard. Judging by the noise the audience
made, they hadn’t expected that either.

Afterwards, I stood, dazed, in the fug of the packed dressing room. It had
gone amazingly well. Everyone from Britain was elated. Norman Winter was
talking with a speed and intensity that suggested that on the journey from
LAX he’d actually been at his most laid-back and laconic. People from Uni

Records kept bringing other people over to shake my hand. Journalists.
Celebrities. Quincy Jones. Quincy Jones’s wife. Quincy Jones’s children. He
seemed to have turned up with his entire family. I couldn’t take anything in.

Then I froze. Somewhere over the shoulder of one of Quincy Jones’s
umpteen relatives I could see Leon Russell in the doorway. He started
pushing through the crowd towards me. His face was as impassive and mean
as it had seemed from the stage: he didn’t look much like a man who’d just
enjoyed the night of his life. Shit. I’ve been found out. He’s going to tell
everyone what a fraud I am. He’s going to tell me that I can’t play piano.

He shook my hand and asked how I was doing. His voice was a soft
Oklahoma drawl. Then he told me I’d just played a great gig, and asked if I
wanted to go on tour with him.

Oe

The next few days passed like a strange, feverish dream. We played more
shows at the Troubadour, all of them packed out, all of them fantastic. More
celebrities came. Each night, I ruammaged deeper in my bag of Mr Freedom
clothes, pulling out stuff that was more and more outrageous, until I found
myself facing an audience of rock stars and Los Angeles tastemakers wearing
a pair of tight silver hot pants, bare legs and a T-shirt with ROCK AND
ROLL emblazoned across it in sequins. Leon Russell appeared backstage
again and told me his home-made recipe for a sore throat remedy, as if we
were old friends. Uni Records took us all to Disneyland, and I bought armfuls
of albums at Tower Records on Sunset Strip. The LA Times published a
review by their music editor, Robert Hilburn. ‘Rejoice,’ it opened. ‘Rock
music, which has been going through a rather uneventful period recently, has
a new star. He’s Elton John, a 23-year-old Englishman, whose debut Tuesday
night at the Troubadour was, in almost every way, magnificent.’ Fucking
hell. Bob Hilburn was a huge deal: I’d known he was at the gig, but I had no
idea he was going to write that. Once it was published, Ray Williams was
suddenly deluged with offers from American promoters. It was decided we’d
extend our stay and play more shows, in San Francisco and New York. I did
interview after interview. The Elton John album was all over FM radio. One
station in Pasadena, KPPC, took out a full-page advert in the Los Angeles

Free Press literally thanking me for coming to America.

As everyone knows, fame, especially sudden fame, is a hollow, shallow
and dangerous thing, its dark, seductive powers no substitute for true love or
real friendship. On the other hand, if you’re a terribly shy person, desperately
in need of a confidence boost — someone who spent a lot of their childhood
trying to be as invisible as possible so you didn’t provoke one of your mum’s
moods or your dad’s rage — I can tell you for a fact that being hailed as the
future of rock and roll in the LA Times and feted by a succession of your
musical heroes will definitely do the trick. As evidence, I present to you the
sight of Elton John, a twenty-three-year-old virgin, a man who’s never
chatted anyone up in his life, on the night of 31 August 1970. I am in San
Francisco, where I’m due to play a gig in a few days’ time. I am spending the
evening at the Fillmore, watching the British folk-rock band Fairport
Convention — fellow survivors of the sodden hell that was the Krumlin
Festival — and meeting the venue’s owner, legendary promoter Bill Graham,
who is keen for me to perform at his New York concert hall, the Fillmore
East. But I’m not really concentrating on Fairport Convention or Bill
Graham. Because I have decided that tonight is the night I’m going to seduce
someone. Or allow myself to be seduced. Definitely one or the other; either
will do.

I’d discovered that John Reid happened to be in San Francisco at the same
time as me, attending Motown Records’ tenth anniversary celebrations. Since
meeting him through Tony King, I’d casually dropped in on him at EMI a
couple of times. Whatever feeble signals I was attempting to give off — if
indeed I actually was attempting to give any signals off — went completely
unnoticed. He seemed to think I was only visiting in order to ransack the pile
of soul singles in his office, or to give him copies of my own records. But
that was then. Emboldened by the events of the last week, I managed to find
out where he was staying and rang him up. I breathlessly told him about what
had happened in LA, and then, as nonchalantly as possible, suggested we
should meet up. I was staying at the Miyako, a nice little Japanese-themed
hotel near the Fillmore. Perhaps he could come over for a drink one night?

The gig finished. I went backstage to say hello to Fairport, had a couple
of drinks and a quick chat, then made my excuses and went back to the

Miyako alone. I hadn’t been in my room long when the phone rang: there’s a
Mr Reid to see you in reception. Oh God. This is it.

four

Things moved very quickly after that night in San Francisco. A week later, I
was in Philadelphia, doing interviews, when I got a call from John, who’d
gone back to England, telling me that he’d bumped into Tony King at the
BBC. He’d told Tony what had happened, and what our plans were. Tony
had gone from baffled — ‘Reg? Reg is gay? You’re moving in together, as in
moving in together?’ — to uproariously amused when he heard about my
desire that the relationship stay low-key. ‘What do you mean, Reg wants to
keep it quiet? He’s with you! Everyone who’s set foot in a London gay club
knows about you! He might as well hang a fucking neon sign out of the
window with I AM GAY written on it.’

I wanted to keep it quiet because I wasn’t sure how people would react if
they knew. I needn’t have worried. None of my friends or the people I
worked with cared at all. Bernie, the band, Dick James and Steve Brown: I
got the feeling they were just relieved that I’d finally had sex. And outside of
those circles, no one seemed to entertain the faintest possibility that I might
be anything other than straight. It seems insane now that no one even raised
an eyebrow, when you consider what I was wearing and doing onstage, but it
was a different world then. Homosexuality had only been decriminalized in
Britain for three years: the wider public’s knowledge or understanding of the
subject was pretty sketchy. When we toured America, all the legendary
groupies from that era — the Plaster Casters and Sweet Connie from Little
Rock — would turn up backstage, to the evident delight of the band and road
crew. I’d think, ‘Hang on, what are you doing here? Surely you’re not here
for me? Surely someone’s told you? And even if they haven’t, I’ve just been

carried onstage by a bodybuilder, while wearing half the world’s supply of
diamanté, sequins and marabou feathers — does that not suggest anything to
you?’ Apparently not. I became quite adept at slipping away and locking
myself in the toilet to escape their attentions.

If anyone I knew felt it was odd that I was setting up home with John so
soon, they didn’t mention it. And as it turned out, the speed with which my
relationship with John progressed was just the first indication of what I was
like. I was the kind of person who met someone, immediately fell head over
heels and started planning our life together. Incapable of telling a crush from
real love, I could see the white picket fence and an eternity of connubial bliss
before I’d even spoken to someone. Later, when I was really famous, this
became a terrible problem both for me and the object of my affections. I’d
insist they gave up their own lives in order to follow me around on tour, with
disastrous results every time.

But that was in the future. I really was in love with John — that intense,
guileless, naive kind of first love. And I’d just discovered sex. It made sense
to move in together. Under the circumstances, my current living
arrangements were hardly ideal. Straight or gay, you’re going to struggle to
conduct a meaningful sexual relationship with someone if you’re living in
your mum’s spare room and your co-writer’s trying to sleep in the bunk bed
under yours.

When I got back from America we started looking for a flat to rent
together. We found one in a development called the Water Gardens, near
Edgware Road: one bedroom, a bathroom, a living room and a kitchen.
Bernie temporarily moved in with Steve Brown. He’d fallen in love in
California too, with a girl called Maxine, who’d been on the famous day trip
to Palm Springs. No wonder he’d been so eager to go.

The last people I told were my mum and Derf. I waited until a few weeks
after I’?d moved out. I suppose I was psyching myself up. I finally decided the
moment was right the night John and I were supposed to go and see Liberace
at the London Palladium. We had tickets, but I told John to go on his own, I
had to ring Mum that night. I was nervous, but the phone call went OK. I told
Mum I was gay and she seemed totally unsurprised: ‘Oh, we know. We’ve
known that for a long time.’ At the time I put her knowledge of my sexuality

down to the intangible mystic power of a mother’s intuition, although, with
the benefit of hindsight, she and Derf probably got an inkling what was going
on when they helped move my stuff into the Water Garden and realized that I
was living in a one-bedroom flat with another man.

Mum wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea that I was gay — she said
something about condemning myself to a life of loneliness, which didn’t
seem to make a huge amount of sense, given that I was in a relationship — but
at least she hadn’t disowned me, or refused to accept it. And bizarrely, when
he got home, I noticed that John looked like he’d had a much more stressful
evening than I had. It turned out that midway through the show, Liberace had
unexpectedly announced that he had a very special guest in the audience, a
wonderful new singer who was going to be a big star: ‘... and I know he’s
here tonight, and I’m going to make him stand up and wave to you all,
because he’s so fabulous ... Elton John!’ Assuming that my reluctance to
make myself known was down to modesty, Liberace had become
progressively more solicitous — ‘Come on now, Elton, don’t be shy, the
audience want to meet you. Don’t you wanna meet Elton John, ladies and
gentlemen? I tell you, this guy’s gonna be huge — let’s give him a big hand
and see if we can’t get him to say hello’ — while a huge spotlight vainly
circled the stalls. In John’s telling of the story, Liberace had carried on like
this for about three weeks, during which time the audience had grown first
restless, then audibly irritated at my churlish refusal to show myself.
Meanwhile, the one person among them who actually knew Elton John’s
whereabouts had grown concerned he was going to become the first person in
history to literally die of embarrassment. Eventually, Liberace had given up.
According to John, he was still smiling, but something about the way he
launched into Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody suggested murderous fury.

Ruining a Liberace concert while coming out to my _ parents
notwithstanding, life was heaven. I was finally able to be who I was, to have
no fear about myself, to have no fear about sex. I mean it in the nicest
possible way when I say John taught me how to be debauched. As Tony had
noted, John really knew the gay scene, the clubs and the pubs. We’d go to the
Vauxhall Tavern to see Lee Sutton, this great drag queen — ‘The name is Lee
Sutton, DSM, OBE — Dirty Sex Maniac, On the Bed with Everybody’ — and

to the Sombrero club on Kensington High Street. We would have dinner
parties and other musicians would drop by. One night, after we went to see
him play live, Neil Young came back home with us and, after a few drinks,
elected to perform his forthcoming album in its entirety for us at 2 a.m.
Already alerted to the fact that an impromptu party was going on by the
nerve-jangling sound of my friend Kiki Dee drunkenly walking into a glass
door while holding a tray containing every champagne glass we owned, the
delight of the adjoining flats at Neil Young performing his forthcoming
album was audible. So that’s how I heard the classic ‘Heart Of Gold’ for the
first time, presented in a unique arrangement of solo piano, voice and
neighbour intermittently banging on the ceiling with a broom handle and
loudly imploring Neil Young to shut up.

My career suddenly had real momentum. We weren’t as big in Britain as
we were in the US, but the band and I had come back from America with a
new sense of purpose. We’d been validated, ratified by so many people over
there that we knew we were on to something. Word of what had happened in
Los Angeles had filtered back to Britain and the press were suddenly
interested. A hippy magazine called Friends sent a journalist to interview me.
I played him two tracks we’d already recorded for the next album,
Tumbleweed Connection, and in the subsequent article he went as nuts as
Robert Hilburn had done: ‘I think that along with his lyricist he will possibly
become the finest, and almost certainly the most popular songwriter in
England, and eventually the world.’ We played at the Royal Albert Hall,
supporting Fotheringay, a band formed by Fairport Convention’s former lead
singer Sandy Denny. Like the audience at the Troubadour, they thought they
were getting a sensitive singer-songwriter — the perfect complement to what
they did, which was wistful folk rock — and instead they got rock ‘n’ roll and
Mr Freedom clothes and handstands on the piano keyboard. They couldn’t
follow us: we had so much adrenalin and confidence. Of course, when the
adrenalin wore off and I realized what we’d done, I felt terrible. Sandy Denny
was one of my heroes, an amazing vocalist. It was meant to be their big
showcase gig and I’d ruined it for them. I scuttled home, absolutely
mortified, before they came onstage.

But it felt like the time was right. The sixties were over, The Beatles had

split up and there was a new wave of artists that were all starting to make it at
the same time: me, Rod Stewart, Marc Bolan, David Bowie. Musically we
were all very different, but in some ways we were birds of a feather. We were
all working-class Londoners, we’d all spent the sixties with our noses pressed
against the glass, toiling away on the same club circuit, never really getting
where we wanted to go. And we all knew each other. Our paths had crossed
backstage in r’n’b clubs and at gigs at the Roundhouse. I was never great
friends with Bowie. I loved his music, and we socialized a couple of times,
visiting the Sombrero with Tony King and having dinner together in Covent
Garden while he was rehearsing for the Ziggy Stardust tour, but there was
always something distant and aloof about him, at least when I was around. I
honestly don’t know what the problem was, but there clearly was a problem.
Years later, he’d always make snippy remarks about me in interviews: ‘the
token queen of rock and roll’ was the most famous one, although in fairness,
he was absolutely out of his mind on coke when he said it.

But I adored Marc and Rod. They couldn’t have been more different.
Marc seemed to have come from another planet: there was something
otherworldly about him, as if he was just passing through Earth on his way to
somewhere else. You could hear it in his music. ‘Ride A White Swan’ was
never off the radio when we moved into the Water Garden, and it didn’t
sound like anything else, you couldn’t work out where he was coming from.
That’s what he was like in person. He was larger than life — straight but very
camp — and incredibly kind and gentle at the same time. He clearly had a big
ego, but he also never seemed to take himself seriously at all. He somehow
managed to be simultaneously completely charming and absolutely, brazenly
full of shit. He’d say the most outrageous things with a straight face:
‘Darling, I sold a million records this morning.’ I’d think: Marc, no one in the
history of music has ever sold a million records in a morning, let alone you.
But something about him was so beguiling and endearing, you would never
actually say that out loud. Instead, you’d find yourself agreeing with him: ‘A
million, Marc? Congratulations! How fabulous!’

I’d known about Rod for years, because of the connection with Long John
Baldry, but I only really got to know him after he covered ‘Country
Comfort’, one of the new songs that I’d played the journalist from Friends.

He changed the lyrics, something I complained about at length in the press:
‘He sounds like he made it up as he went along! He couldn’t have got further
from the original if he’d sung “The Camptown Races”!’ That rather set the
tone for our friendship. We’ve got a lot in common. We both love football
and collecting art. We both grew up after the war in families that didn’t have
a lot, so neither of us has ever been coy about enjoying the fruits of our
success, shall we say. But the thing we really share is our sense of humour.
For a man with a well-documented lifelong obsession with leggy blondes,
Rod’s got a surprisingly camp sense of humour. He happily joined in when
we Started giving ourselves drag names back in the seventies. I was Sharon,
John was Beryl, Tony was Joy and Rod was Phyllis. We’ve spent nearly fifty
years constantly taking the piss out of, and trying to put one over, each other.
When the press were speculating about my hair falling out, and whether or
not I’d started wearing a hairpiece, Rod could be relied upon to send me a
present: one of those old-fashioned, helmet-shaped hairdryers that old women
used to sit under in salons. Keen to reciprocate his thoughtfulness, I sent him
a Zimmer frame covered in fairy lights. Even today, if I notice he’s got an
album out that’s selling better than mine, I know it’s only a matter of time
before I’m going to get an email: ‘Hello, Sharon, just writing to say I’m so
sorry that your record’s not even in the Top 100, dear. What a pity when
mine’s doing so well, love, Phyllis.’

It reached a kind of peak in the early eighties, when Rod was playing
Earls Court. They had advertised the gig by flying a blimp over the venue
with his face on it. I was staying in London that weekend and I could see it
from my hotel room window. It was too good an opportunity to miss. So I
called my management and they hired someone to shoot it down: apparently
it landed on top of a double-decker bus and was last seen heading towards
Putney. About an hour later, the phone went. It was Rod, spluttering about
the disappearance.

“Where’s my fucking balloon gone? It was you, wasn’t it? You cow! You
bitch!’

A year later, I was playing Olympia and the promoters had hung a huge
banner across the street. It was mysteriously cut down immediately after it
was put up. The phone call that informed me of this sabotage came from Rod,

who seemed curiously well informed about exactly what had happened.
‘Such a shame about your banner, love. I heard it wasn’t even up five
minutes. I bet you didn’t even get to see it.’

wo

Not long after we moved into the Water Gardens, I was back in America for
another tour. It’s a huge country and most of it couldn’t care less if the LA
Times has called you the future of rock and roll. You have to get out there
and show people what you can do. Besides, we had a new album to promote
— Tumbleweed Connection was already finished: recorded in March 1970 and
released in the UK in the October. That’s just how it was then. You didn’t
take three years to make an album. You recorded quick, you got it out fast,
you kept the momentum going, kept things fresh. It suited the way I worked.
I hate wasting time in the studio. I suppose it’s a legacy from my days as a
session musician, or recording demos in the middle of the night at DJM: you
were always working against the clock.

So we criss-crossed the States, usually playing as a support act, for Leon
Russell, The Byrds, Poco, The Kinks and Eric Clapton’s new band Derek
And The Dominos. That was the idea of my booking agent, Howard Rose,
and a really clever move: don’t play top of the bill, play second, make people
want to come back and see you again in your own right. Every artist we
supported was incredibly kind and generous to us, but it was hard work. Each
night, we’d go onstage with the intention of stealing the show. We’d go down
great, and come off thinking we’d blown the headliners offstage, and every
night, the headliners would come out and play better than us. People talk
about Derek And The Dominos being a real disaster area, strung out on
heroin and booze, but you would never have known that if you’d seen them
live that autumn. They were phenomenal. From the side of the stage, I took
mental notes about their performance. Eric Clapton was the star, but it was
their keyboard player, Bobby Whitlock, that I watched like a hawk. He was
from Memphis, learned his craft hanging around Stax Studios and played
with that soulful, Deep Southern gospel feel. Touring with them or Leon was
like being on the road with Patti LaBelle or Major Lance when I was in
Bluesology: you watched and you learned, from people who had more

experience than you.

If we still had a long way to go, it was clear on that tour that the word was
spreading. In LA, we had dinner with Danny Hutton from Three Dog Night
and he casually mentioned that Brian Wilson wanted to meet us. Really? I
had idolized The Beach Boys in the sixties, but their career had tailed off, and
Brian Wilson had turned into this mysterious, mythic figure — according to
some lurid gossip he was supposed to have become a recluse, or gone insane,
or both. Oh no, Danny assured us, he’s a huge fan, he’d love you to visit.

So we drove up to his house in Bel Air, a Spanish-style mansion with an
intercom at the gate. Danny buzzed it and announced he was here with Elton
John. There was a deathly silence at the other end. Then there was a voice,
unmistakably that of The Beach Boys’ mastermind, singing the chorus of
“Your Song’: ‘I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind’. As we
approached the front door, it opened to reveal Brian Wilson himself. He
looked fine — a little chubbier than on the cover of Pet Sounds, perhaps, but
nothing like the reclusive weirdo people gossiped about. We said hello. He
stared at us and nodded. Then he sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ again. He
said we should come upstairs and meet his kids. It turned out that his kids
were asleep in bed. He woke them up. “This is Elton John!’ he enthused. His
daughters looked understandably baffled. He sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’
to them: ‘I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind’. Then he sang the
chorus of ‘Your Song’ to us again. By now, the novelty of hearing the chorus
of ‘Your Song’ sung to me by one of pop history’s true geniuses was
beginning to wear a little thin. I was struck by the sinking feeling that we
were in for quite a long and trying evening. I turned to Bernie and a certain
look passed between us, that somehow managed to combine fear, confusion
and the fact that we were both desperately trying not to laugh at the absolute
preposterousness of the situation we found ourselves in, a look that said: what
the fuck is happening ?

It was a look that we grew increasingly accustomed to using during the
last months of 1970. I was invited to a party at Mama Cass Elliot’s house on
Woodrow Wilson Drive in LA, famed as the leading hang-out for Laurel
Canyon’s musicians, the place where Crosby, Stills and Nash had formed,
and David Crosby had shown off his new discovery, a singer-songwriter

called Joni Mitchell, to his friends. When I arrived, they were all there. It was
nuts, like the record sleeves in the bedroom at Frome Court had come to life:
what the fuck is happening?

We passed Bob Dylan on the stairs at the Fillmore East, and he stopped,
introduced himself, then told Bernie he loved the lyrics of a song from
Tumbleweed called ‘My Father’s Gun’: what the fuck is happening ?

We were sitting backstage after a gig in Philadelphia when the dressing
room door opened and five men walked in unannounced. You couldn’t
mistake The Band for anyone else: they looked like they’d just stepped off
the cover of the album we’d played to death back in England. Robbie
Robertson and Richard Manuel started telling us they’d flown in from
Massachusetts by private plane just to see the show, while I tried to behave as
if The Band flying in from Massachusetts to see me perform was a perfectly
normal state of affairs, and occasionally stole a glance at Bernie, who was
similarly engaged in a desperate attempt to play it cool. A year ago, we were
dreaming of trying to write songs like them and now they’re stood in front of
us, asking us to play them our new album: what the fuck is happening?

It wasn’t just The Band who wanted to meet us. It was their managers,
Albert Grossman and Bennett Glotzer. They were legendary American music
business figures, particularly Grossman, a renowned tough guy who’d
managed Bob Dylan since the early sixties. He had reacted to another client,
Janis Joplin, becoming addicted to heroin not by intervening but by taking a
life insurance policy out on her. Word must have reached them that I was
currently without a manager. Ray Williams was a lovely man, I owed him a
great deal and he was incredibly loyal — he’d even named his daughter
Amoreena, after another of the Tumbleweed Connection songs — but after the
first American trip, I’d talked it over with the rest of the band, and no one
thought he was the right person to look after us. But nor were Grossman and
Glotzer, as I realized the moment I met them. They were like characters from
a film, a film that had been panned for its hopelessly cartoonish depiction of
two aggressive, motor-mouthed American showbiz managers. Nevertheless
they were real people, and their collective efforts to win me over succeeded
in scaring me witless. As long as there was a vacancy, they were not going to
leave me alone.

‘I’m going to follow you around until you sign for me,’ Glotzer told me.

He wasn’t joking. There seemed to be no way of getting rid of him short
of applying for a restraining order. Once again, the allure of locking myself in
the toilet became hard to resist.

It might have been while I was in hiding from Bennett Glotzer that I
started thinking about getting John to manage me. The more I considered it,
the more it made sense. John was young and ambitious and full of adrenalin.
He’d grown up in working-class Paisley in the fifties and sixties, an
experience which had left him tough enough to deal with anything the music
business threw at him. We were already a couple, which meant he’d have my
best interests at heart. He was a born hustler with the gift of the gab and he
was brilliant at his job. He didn’t just know music, he was smart about music.
Earlier in the year, he’d personally convinced Motown to release a three-
year-old album track by Smokey Robinson And The Miracles as a single,
then watched as “Tears Of A Clown’ went to Number One on both sides of
the Atlantic. It sold so many copies that Smokey Robinson had to put his
plans to retire from music on hold.

Everyone agreed it was a good idea, including John. He quit EMI and
Motown at the end of the year, got a desk in Dick James’s office — initially, at
least, he was effectively an employee of DJM, given a salary to act as a kind
of liaison between me and the company — and that was that. To celebrate, we
traded in my Ford Escort for an Aston Martin. It was the first really
extravagant thing I ever bought, the first sign I was actually making good
money from music. We got it off Maurice Gibb from The Bee Gees and it
was a real pop star’s car: a purple DB6, flashy and beautiful. And completely
impractical, as we discovered when John had to meet Martha And The
Vandellas off their flight at Heathrow Airport. It was one of his last jobs for
Motown, and we proudly took the Aston Martin along. Martha And The
Vandellas looked impressed until they realized they had to get into the back
of it. The designers had clearly spent considerably more time on its sleek
lines and poetic contours than they had worrying about whether the rear seats
could house a legendary soul trio. Somehow they got in. Perhaps Motown’s
famous Charm School had given classes on contortionism. As I drove back
down the A40, I looked in the rear-view mirror. It was like a Tokyo tube train

during rush hour back there. Hang on, Martha And The Vandellas were
crammed into the back of my car, which was an Aston Martin. That would
have seemed very strange twelve months ago, when I was driving a Ford
Escort, its back seat noticeably devoid of Motown superstars. But after the
year I’d had, strange was becoming a relative concept.

I didn’t have too much time to ruminate on how my life had changed. I
was working too hard. We spent 1971 touring: backwards and forwards
between America and Britain, then down to Japan, New Zealand and
Australia. We were headlining now, but we still followed Howard Rose’s
advice and played venues that were slightly smaller than we could fill, or one
night in a city when we could have sold out two. We did the same thing in
Britain — we kept playing the universities and rock clubs long after we could
have filled theatres. It’s a really smart thing to do: don’t be greedy, build your
career up gradually, and it was typical Howard. He was so bright and full of
good advice: he’s still my agent today. I was really lucky with the people I
worked with when I was just starting out in America. Young British artists
could easily fall in with a bunch of sharks over there, but I got people who
went out of their way to make me feel part of a family: not just Howard, but
my publisher David Rosner and his wife Margo.

If I wasn’t onstage, I was in the studio. I released four albums in America
in 1971: Tumbleweed Connection didn’t come out there until January; the
soundtrack to a movie called Friends in March — which was only a minor hit,
but still did better than the film, a complete flop — a live album we’d recorded
the previous year, 11-17-70, in May; and Madman Across the Water in
November. We recorded Madman in four days. It was supposed to be five,
but we lost a day because of Paul Buckmaster. He stayed up the night before
the sessions began to finish the arrangements — I suspect with a certain
amount of chemical assistance — then managed to knock a bottle of ink all
over the only score, ruining it. I was furious. It was an expensive mistake to
make, and we stopped working together for decades afterwards. But I was
also quietly impressed when he wrote the whole score again, in twenty-four
hours. Even when Paul screwed up, he screwed up in a way that reminded
you he was a genius.

And I love Madman Across the Water. At the time, it was a much bigger

hit in America than in Britain: Top Ten over there, but only number 41 at
home. It’s not particularly commercial; there were no huge smash singles,
and the songs were much longer and more complex than I’d written before.
Some of Bernie’s lyrics were like a diary of the last year. One song, ‘All The
Nasties’, was about me, wondering aloud what would happen if I came out
publicly: ‘If it came to pass that they should ask — what would I tell them?
Would they criticize behind my back? Maybe I should let them’. Not a single
person seemed to notice what I was singing about.

One other thing happened during the Madman sessions. Gus Dudgeon
hired a guitarist called Davey Johnstone to play acoustic guitar and mandolin
on a couple of tracks. I really liked him — he was Scottish, lanky and very
forthright, and he had really good taste in music. I took Gus aside and asked
what he thought about Davey joining the band. I’d been thinking about
expanding the trio to include a guitarist for a while. Gus thought it was a bad
idea. Davey was a wonderful guitarist, but he only played acoustic: as far as
Gus knew, he’d never even played an electric guitar. He was in a band called
Magna Carta, who specialized in bucolic folk, and there wasn’t a lot of that in
the Elton John repertoire.

It was a very persuasive argument. I ignored it and offered Davey the job
anyway. If I’d learned anything over the last few years, it was that sometimes
a gut feeling is the most important thing. You can work as hard as you like,
and plan as carefully as you want, but there are moments when it’s just about
a hunch, about trusting your instincts, or about fate. What if I’d never
responded to the Liberty advert? What if I’d passed the audition and they
hadn’t given me Bernie’s lyrics? What if Steve Brown hadn’t showed up at
DJM? What if Dick hadn’t been so certain I should go to America, when it
seemed like such a stupid idea?

So when we went to France to record the next album at the Chateau
d’Hérouville, Davey was with us. I’d changed things around a lot — it was the
first time I’d tried to record an album with my touring band rather than crack
session musicians; the first time that Davey had picked up an electric guitar;
the first time we’d had the money to record abroad, in a residential studio —
but I was in a really confident mood. Just before we left for France I’d legally
changed my name to Elton John. Elton Hercules John. I’d always thought

middle names were slightly ridiculous, so I did the most ridiculous thing I
could think of and took mine from the rag and bone man’s horse in the sitcom
Steptoe and Son. Basically, I had got sick of the fuss in shops when the
cashier recognized me but not the name on my chequebook. But it really
seemed more symbolic than practical — like I was finally, conclusively,
legally leaving Reg Dwight behind, fully becoming the person I was
supposed to be. As it turned out, it wasn’t quite as simple as that, but in that
moment, it felt good.

I loved the idea of working at the Chateau, even though it came with a
reputation attached. It was supposed to be haunted, and the locals had
apparently become wary of the studio’s clientele after The Grateful Dead had
stayed there, offered to play a free concert for the villagers, then taken it upon
themselves to expand the minds of rural France by spiking their audience’s
drinks with LSD. But it was a beautiful building, an eighteenth-century
mansion — we ended up naming the album after it: Honky Chateau — and I
was excited about the idea of having to write songs on the spot.

I’m not a musician who walks around with melodies in his head all the
time. I don’t rush to the piano in the middle of the night when inspiration
strikes. I don’t even think about songwriting when I’m not actually doing it.
Bernie writes the words, gives them to me, I read them, play a chord and
something else takes over, something comes through my fingers. The muse,
God, luck: you can give it a name if you want, but I’ve no idea what it is. I
just know straight away where the melody’s going to go. Sometimes a song
only takes as long to write as it does to listen to. ‘Sad Songs (Say So Much)’
was like that — I sat down, read the lyric and played it, pretty much the same
as you hear on the record. Sometimes it takes a bit longer. If I don’t like what
I’ve done after about forty minutes, I give up and move on to something else.
There are words that Bernie’s written that I’ve never managed to come up
with music for. He wrote a great lyric called ‘The Day That Bobby Went
Electric’, about hearing Dylan sing ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ for the
first time, and I just couldn’t get a tune I thought was right; I tried four or five
times. But I’ve never had writer’s block, I’ve never sat down with one of
Bernie’s lyrics and nothing has come out. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it
and I don’t want to explain it. Actually, I love that I can’t explain it. It’s the

spontaneity of it that’s beautiful.

So Bernie brought his typewriter to the Chateau, and we set up some
instruments in the dining room as well as the studio. Bernie would bash out
his lyrics and leave them for me on the piano. I’d wake up early, go to the
dining room, see what he’d come up with and write songs while I was having
breakfast. The first morning we were there, I had three done by the time the
band drifted downstairs looking for something to eat: ‘Mona Lisas and Mad
Hatters’, ‘Amy’ and ‘Rocket Man’.

Once Davey had been convinced that this wasn’t an elaborate prank at the
expense of the new boy, that I really had written three songs while he was
having a lie-in, he picked up his guitar and asked me to play ‘Rocket Man’
again. He didn’t add a solo or do anything that a regular lead guitar player
might do. He used a slide and played odd, lonely notes that drifted around
and away from the melody. It was great. Like I said, sometimes a gut feeling
is the most important thing; sometimes you have to trust fate.

The rest of the band were so used to playing together that there was
something almost telepathic between us: they just intuitively knew what to do
with a song without being told. It felt fantastic, sitting together in the
Chateau’s dining room, hearing a song take shape around us, trying ideas and
knowing straight away they were the right ideas. There’s times in my life
when music has been an escape, the only thing that worked when everything
else seemed broken, but at that moment I had nothing to escape from. I was
twenty-four, successful, settled and in love. What’s more, tomorrow we had a
day off and I was going to Paris, with every intention of absolutely looting
the Yves Saint-Laurent store.

five

In 1972, John and I moved out of London to Virginia Water in Surrey,
swapping the one-bedroom flat for something a little more grand: we bought
a three-bedroom bungalow, with its own swimming pool, and a games room
built in what had been the loft. I called it Hercules, to match my middle
name. Bernie and Maxine, who had married in 1971, had a house nearby;
Mum and Derf, who’d finally got married too, moved just down the road and
kept an eye on the bungalow when we were away. They call that area of
England the stockbroker belt, which makes it sound boring and suburban, but
it wasn’t at all. For one thing, Keith Moon lived ten minutes away from me,
which obviously lent daily life a certain unpredictability. Keith was fabulous,
but his diet of chemicals seemed to have left him without any understanding
of the concept of time. He’d turn up unannounced at two thirty in the
morning, completely out of his mind — usually with Ringo Starr, another local
resident, in tow — and seem genuinely surprised that he’d got you out of bed.
Or he’d materialize without warning in your driveway at 7 a.m. on Christmas
Day, in a Rolls-Royce convertible with the top down and The Shadows’
Greatest Hits playing at deafening volume. ‘Dear boy! Look at the new car!
Come for a spin! No, now! No need to change out of your dressing gown!’
But the most interesting person I knew in Virginia Water had nothing to
do with the music business. I met Bryan Forbes when I walked into the
bookshop he owned in the town, looking for something to read. He came over
and introduced himself and said that he thought he recognized me. That
didn’t seem unlikely — by now, my onstage flamboyance had seeped into my
everyday wardrobe, so my idea of dressing down for an afternoon’s shopping

in a Surrey commuter town involved wearing a bright orange fur coat and a
pair of eight-inch platform boots. But it turned out that he didn’t recognize
me at all: as the conversation progressed, it became increasingly apparent that
he thought I was one of The Bee Gees.

Once we’d established that I wasn’t a Gibb brother, we got on very well.
Bryan was fascinating. He’d been an actor, and was now a screenwriter, a
novelist and a director, and he would go on to become a studio boss. He was
married to the actress Nanette Newman and the two of them seemed to know
everybody personally: Hollywood legends, writers, TV stars. If you were in
America and expressed a long-held desire to meet David Niven or Groucho
Marx, Bryan could arrange it, which is how I ended up with a Marx Brothers
film poster signed ‘to John Elton from Marx Groucho’: he couldn’t
understand why my name was, as he put it, ‘the wrong way round’. It’s
funny, I thought of Groucho years later at Buckingham Palace, when I got my
knighthood, because that’s how the Lord Chamberlain announced me to the
Queen: ‘Sir John Elton’.

One summer Sunday afternoon, John and I were sitting outside the
bungalow having a snack, when we noticed a sixty-something lady who
looked a little like Katharine Hepburn cycling up our drive. It was Katharine
Hepburn: ‘I’m staying with Bryan Forbes — he said it would be OK if I used
your pool.’ John and I just nodded, dumbstruck. Five minutes later, she
reappeared in a swimsuit, complaining that there was a dead frog in the pool.
When I dithered about how to get it out — I’m a bit squeamish about things
like that — she just jumped in and grabbed it with her hand. I asked her how
she could bear to touch it.

‘Character, young man,’ she nodded sternly.

If you were invited to the Forbes house for lunch you’d find yourself
sitting between Peter Sellers and Dame Edith Evans, drinking in their stories,
or you’d turn up to discover that the other guests included the Queen Mother.
Bryan knew the Royal Family: he was president of the National Youth
Theatre, and Princess Margaret was a patron. It turned out that Princess
Margaret loved music and the company of musicians. She ended up inviting
me and the band back to Kensington Palace for supper after a gig at the Royal
Festival Hall, which turned out to be incredibly awkward. Not because of

Princess Margaret — she was really sweet and friendly to everybody — but
because of her husband, Lord Snowdon. Everyone knew the marriage was in
trouble — there were always rumours in the press about one or the other
having an affair — but even so, nothing could have prepared us for his arrival.
He stormed in midway through the meal and literally snarled ‘Where’s my
fucking dinner?’ at her. They had a huge row, and she fled the room in tears.
Me and the band were just sitting there, aghast, not really knowing what to
do. You know, how bizarre can life in the Elton John Band get? Other
musicians relax after a gig by smoking a joint or seducing groupies or
trashing hotel rooms; we end up watching Princess Margaret and Lord
Snowdon screaming at each other.

But it wasn’t just who Bryan knew, it was what he knew, and the fact that
he was a born teacher: patient and generous with his time, sophisticated in his
tastes but completely unsnobbish, eager for others to love the things he loved.
He taught me about art, and I started collecting under his influence. First it
was art nouveau and art deco posters, which were very fashionable in the
early seventies — Rod Stewart collected them too — then surrealist painters
like Paul Wunderlich. I began buying Tiffany lamps and Bugatti furniture.
Bryan got me interested in theatre, and recommended books to me. We
became very close, and started going on holiday together: me and John,
Bryan, Nanette and their daughters Emma and Sarah. We would hire a house
in California for a month, and friends would come over and visit.

Nanette turned out to be a great accomplice when it came to shopping,
something I’d become extremely fond of since I started making a bit of
money. Actually, that’s not strictly true. ve always loved shopping, since I
was a kid. When I think of growing up in Pinner, I think of the shops: the
different-coloured cotton reels in the wool shop where my gran used to get
her knitting supplies; the smell of fresh peanuts as you walked into
Woolworths; the sawdust on the floor of Sainsbury’s, where Auntie Win
worked on the butter counter. I don’t know why, but something about those
places fascinated me. I’ve always loved collecting things, and I’ve always
loved buying people presents, more than I love receiving them. When I was a
boy, my favourite thing about Christmas was working out what I was going
to buy my family: some aftershave for my dad, a rain hat for my gran, maybe

a little vase for my mum from the kiosk near Baker Street station that I used
to pass on my way to the Royal Academy of Music.

Of course, becoming successful enabled me to pursue this passion on a
slightly different scale. We’d come back from LA with so much stuff that the
excess baggage charge would be as much as the ticket home. I’d hear that my
auntie Win was feeling down in the dumps so I’d call a dealership and get
them to send her a new car to cheer her up. Over the years, I’ve had therapists
tell me that it’s obsessive, addictive behaviour, or that I’m trying to buy
people’s affection by giving them gifts. With the greatest of respect to the
members of the psychiatric profession who have said that sort of thing to me,
I think that’s a load of old shit. I’m not interested in buying people’s
affection. I just get a lot of pleasure out of making people feel included or
letting them know I’m thinking about them. I love seeing people’s faces
when you treat them to something.

I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that material possessions aren’t a
replacement for love or personal happiness. I’ve spent enough miserable,
lonely nights in houses filled with beautiful things to have worked that out for
myself a long time ago. And I really don’t recommend going shopping in the
depressing aftermath of a three-day cocaine binge, unless you want to wake
up the next day confronted by bags and bags filled with absolute crap you
don’t actually remember buying. Or, in my case, you wake up the next
morning to a phone call informing you that you’ve bought a tram. Not a
model tram. An actual tram. A Melbourne W2 class drop-centre combination
tram, that the voice at the end of the phone is now informing you has to be
shipped from Australia to Britain, where it can only be delivered to your
house by hanging it from two Chinook helicopters.

So I’d be the first person to admit that I’ve made some fairly rash
decisions with a credit card in my hand. I probably could have struggled
through life somehow without a tram in my garden, or indeed the full-scale
fibreglass model of a Tyrannosaurus rex that I offered to take off Ringo
Starr’s hands at the end of a very long night. Ringo was trying to sell his
house at the time, and the presence of a full-scale fibreglass Tyrannosaurus
rex in the garden was apparently proving to be a bit of a sticking point with
potential buyers. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve always found

collecting things oddly comforting, and I’ve always enjoyed learning about
things by collecting them, whether that’s records or photographs or clothes or
art. And that’s never changed, regardless of what has been going on in my
personal life. I’ve found it comforting and enjoyable when I’ve felt lonely
and adrift, and I’ve found it comforting and enjoyable when I’ve felt loved
and contented and settled. Lots of people feel that way: the world’s full of
model railway enthusiasts and stamp collectors and vinyl buffs. I’m just
lucky enough to have the money to pursue my passions further than most
people. I earned that money by working hard, and if people think the way I
spend it is excessive or ridiculous, then I’m afraid that’s their problem. I
don’t feel guilty about it at all. If it’s an addiction, well, I’ve been addicted to
far more damaging things over the years than buying tableware and
photographs. It makes me happy. You know, I’ve got 1,000 candles in a
closet in my home in Atlanta, and I suppose that is excessive. But I'l tell you
what: it’s the best-smelling closet you’ve ever been in in your life.

My shopping habit wasn’t the only thing that was ramped up a notch.
Everything seemed to be getting bigger, louder, more excessive. Bernie and I
hadn’t intended ‘Rocket Man’ to be a huge hit single — we saw ourselves as
album artists — but that’s what it turned into: it was Number Two in Britain,
much higher than any of our singles had reached before, and went triple-
platinum in the States. We’d stumbled onto a different kind of commerciality,
and its success changed our audience. Screaming girls started appearing in
the front rows and outside the stage door, tearfully clinging on to the car as
we tried to get away. It felt really peculiar, as if they’d gone to see The
Osmonds or David Cassidy but taken a wrong turn and somehow ended up at
our gig instead.

I worked really hard, maybe too hard, but it felt like there was an
unstoppable momentum behind me that carried me on no matter how
exhausted I was, that drove me through any kind of setback. I contracted
glandular fever just before we went into the studio to record Don’t Shoot Me,
I’m Only the Piano Player in the summer of 1972. I should have cancelled
the sessions in order to recuperate, but I just went to the Chateau
d’Heérouville and ploughed through them, running on adrenalin. You would
never have known I was ill from listening to the album: the guy singing

‘Daniel’ and ‘Crocodile Rock’ doesn’t sound unwell. A few weeks after we
finished, I was back on tour again. I kept pushing the live show, trying to
make it more over-the-top and outrageous. I started employing professional
costume designers — first Annie Reavey, then Bill Whitten and Bob Mackie —
and egging them on to do whatever they wanted, no matter how insane: more
feathers, more sequins, brighter colours, bigger platforms. You’ve designed
an outfit covered in multicoloured balls attached to pieces of elastic that glow
in the dark? How many balls? Why don’t you add some more? I won’t be
able to play the piano in it? Let me worry about that.

Then I got the idea of bringing ‘Legs’ Larry Smith, who’d been in The
Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, on tour with us. Legs was a drummer, but his
other big talent was tap dancing. When we were making Honky Chateau, we
had got him to come to the studio and tap-dance on a song called ‘I Think
I’m Going To Kill Myself’, and now I got him to tap-dance onstage as well.
His routine got more and more elaborate as the tour went on. Legs came
onstage in a crash helmet and the vast train of a wedding dress. Then he
started coming onstage accompanied by two dwarfs dressed as US Marines,
while confetti rained from the ceiling. Then he came up with a routine where
he and I would mime to ‘Singing In The Rain’, complete with dialogue. Larry
would lean on my piano and sigh at me: ‘Gee, Elton, I wish I could play like
you. I’ll bet you get all the boys.’ As usual, no one even raised an eyebrow.

I even invited Larry along when I was asked to do the Royal Variety
Performance, which caused a huge row. Bernard Delfont, who organized the
show, mystifyingly didn’t want a man in a wedding train and a crash helmet
tap-dancing in front of the Queen Mother. I told him to fuck off, that I
wouldn’t play unless Larry came on, and he eventually relented. I thought
that it was the best thing about the whole evening, apart from the fact that I
got to share a dressing room with Liberace. He’d clearly forgotten about, or
forgiven me for, my failure to appear at his London Palladium performance a
couple of years before and was just divine, like a living embodiment of
showbiz. He turned up with trunk after trunk of clothes. I thought I looked
pretty outrageous myself — I was dressed in multicoloured lurex pinstripes
with matching platform shoes and top hat — but, by comparison with his side
of the dressing room, mine looked like a particularly dowdy corner of Marks

and Spencer. He had a suit covered in tiny bulbs that lit up when he sat at the
piano. He signed an autograph for me — his signature was in the shape of a
piano — then spent the afternoon reeling off one fantastic story after another
in an impossibly camp accent. The month before, he said, the hydraulic
platform that raised him up through the stage had broken midway through his
grand entrance; nothing if not a trouper, he’d performed for forty minutes
with only his head visible to the audience.

I had become increasingly obsessed with making a big entrance onstage
myself, because it was the one time that I was really mobile, when I wasn’t
stuck behind the piano. It reached a peak when we played the Hollywood
Bowl in 1973. The stage was hung with a huge painting of me in top hat and
tails, surrounded by dancing girls. First Tony King came onstage and
introduced Linda Lovelace, who was the biggest porn star in the world at the
time. Then a succession of lookalikes walked down an illuminated staircase
flanked with palm trees at the back of the stage: the Queen, Batman and
Robin, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Pope. Finally I appeared, to the sound of
the Twentieth-Century Fox theme, dressed in what I called the Incredible
Cheese Straw Outfit: it was completely covered in white marabou feathers —
the trousers as well as the jacket — and came with a matching hat. As I
descended, the lids of five grand pianos sprang open, spelling out ELTON.

For the benefit of anyone who felt this was too subtle and understated,
400 white doves were meant to fly out of the grand pianos. I don’t know
whether they were asleep or too frightened to come out, but none appeared.
As I jumped on top of my own piano, I found myself unexpectedly joined
onstage by John Reid — who, judging by his furious expression, seemed to
have taken the doves’ non-appearance as a personal insult, as if they’d done it
deliberately to challenge his managerial authority — and a more sheepish-
looking Bernie, running from one piano to the next, frantically grabbing
doves and throwing them into the air.

Dance routines, marabou feathers, doves flying — or not, as the case may
be — out of grand pianos with my name on their lids: the band didn’t like this
kind of thing much, and nor did Bernie. He thought it was distracting
attention from the music. I thought I was forging myself into a personality
that was like nobody else in rock. And, besides, I was having fun. We would

have these preposterous disagreements about it. The biggest song-writing
partnership of the era, locked in a dispute backstage at the Santa Monica
Civic, not about money or musical direction, but about whether it was a good
idea for me to go onstage with an illuminated model of Father Christmas
hanging in front of my willy. Sometimes Bernie had a point. The costumes
literally did affect the music. I had a pair of glasses made in the shape of the
word ELTON, with lights all over them. The combined weight of the glasses
and the battery pack that powered the lights squashed my nostrils, so that it
sounded like I was singing while holding my nose. In fairness, that probably
did undercut the emotional impact of his lovingly crafted lyrics.

The Hollywood Bowl show was a huge event, a kind of launch for my
next album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. By my standards at least, its
making had been slightly torturous. We had decamped to Dynamic Sounds
Studios in Kingston, Jamaica: it was considered very hip in those days to go
and make your album somewhere more exotic than Europe. Dynamic Sounds
had seemed like an obvious destination. Bob Marley had recorded there. So
had Cat Stevens. It was where The Rolling Stones had made Goats Head
Soup. But we arrived to find there was a record-pressing plant attached to the
studio, and the pressing plant workers were on strike. When you arrived, they
would pull open the windows of the minibus that brought us from our hotel,
and spit crushed fibreglass at everyone inside with blowpipes, which brought
you out in a rash. Once you got into the studio itself, nothing worked. You
would ask for a different microphone and someone would nod slowly and
say, ‘We can get one in maybe ... three days?’ It was hopeless. I’ve no idea
how The Rolling Stones made an album there. Maybe Keith was so stoned
that three days’ wait for a working microphone felt like twenty minutes.

Eventually we gave up, went back to the hotel, and called to book
recording sessions at the Chateau d’Hérouville. While we were waiting for a
plane out of there, the band sat by the pool, occupying themselves with what
appeared to be some kind of determined world record attempt involving the
consumption of marijuana. By the time we got to the Chateau, we had so
many songs that Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ended up a double album.
When it came out, it took off in a way that none of us expected. It’s quite a
dark record in a lot of ways. Songs about sadness and disillusion, songs about

alcoholics and prostitutes and murders, a song about a sixteen-year-old
lesbian who ends up dead in a subway. But it just kept selling and selling and
selling until I couldn’t work out who was still buying it. I don’t mean that
flippantly: I really didn’t know who was buying it. The American record
company kept pushing me to release ‘Bennie And The Jets’ as a single and I
fought them tooth and nail: it’s a really odd song, it doesn’t sound like
anything else I’ve done, it’s five minutes long; why don’t you just put out
‘Candle In The Wind’, like we’ve done in Britain? Then they told me it was
being played all over black radio stations in Detroit. When they released it, it
shot up the Billboard Soul Chart: an unreal thing, seeing my name in among
the singles by Eddie Kendricks and Gladys Knight and Barry White. I may
not have been the first white artist to do that, but I can say with some
certainty I was the first artist from Pinner.

I was now so successful that I toured America using the Starship, an old
Boeing 720 passenger plane that had been converted into an opulent flying
tour bus for the exclusive use of the seventies’ rock and roll elite. There were
lurid tales about the parties Led Zeppelin had thrown on it. I was less
bothered about what they’d done inside it than by what they’d done to the
outside of it. The thing was painted purple and gold. It looked like a giant box
of Milk Tray with wings. No problem: we could have it repainted to our
specification. It was redone in red and blue with white stars. Much more
tasteful.

Inside, the Starship had a bar decorated in orange and gold foil, with a
long mirror behind it, an organ, dining tables, sofas and a TV with a video
recorder, on which my mother insisted on watching Deep Throat —
‘Everyone’s talking about it, aren’t they? What’s it about, then?’ — while she
was eating her lunch. Whatever foul deeds Led Zeppelin had got up to on
board, I’m pretty sure they never kept themselves amused for an hour
watching a middle-aged lady shriek with horror while Linda Lovelace did her
thing: ‘Oh gawd, no, what’s happening now? Oh! I can’t look! How’s she
doing that?’

There was a bedroom at the back with shower, a fake fireplace and
bedside tables made of plexiglass. You could hide yourself away in there and
have sex. Or sulk, which is what I was doing one night when my American

publicist, Sharon Lawrence, started knocking on the door and pleading with
me to come out: ‘Come back to the bar, we’ve got a surprise for you.’ I told
her to fuck off. She kept coming back. I kept telling her to fuck off.
Eventually she burst into tears — ‘You have to come to the bar! You have to!
You have to!’ — so I angrily opened the door and did as she asked, with a lot
of huffing and eye-rolling and ‘for fuck’s sake, can’t you leave me alone’-ing
en route. When I got to the bar, Stevie Wonder was sitting at the organ, ready
to play for me. He launched into ‘Happy Birthday’. Had I not been cruising at
40,000 feet, I’d have prayed for the ground to open and swallow me.

From the outside, everything looked perfect: the tours were getting bigger
and more spectacular, the records were selling so much that journalists had
started to say I was the biggest pop artist in the world. John had taken over
my Management completely: the contract he had signed with DJM in 1971
had run out, and he had moved out of his offices and started his own
Management company. We had also started our own record company with
Bernie and Gus Dudgeon called Rocket: not to release my records, but to find
talent and give them a break. Sometimes we were better at spotting talent
than developing it — we couldn’t make a success of a band called
Longdancer, despite the fact that their guitarist, a teenager called Dave
Stewart, clearly had something about him, as was proven years later when he
formed Eurythmics. But we had successes, too. We signed Kiki Dee, who
John and I had known for years: she had been the only white British artist
signed to Motown when John worked for them. She had been putting out
singles since the early sixties, but never had a hit until we released her
version of ‘Amoureuse’, a song by a French singer called Véronique Sanson
that had flopped in the UK, but that Tony King had noticed and suggested to
Kiki.

But beneath the surface, things were starting to go wrong. We spent the
first weeks of 1974 recording at the Caribou Ranch, a studio up in the Rocky
Mountains that gave its name to our new album: Caribou. It could be hard to
sing at such a high altitude, which is how I ended up throwing a tantrum
while we were recording ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’. After
announcing that I hated the song so much we were going to stop recording it
immediately and send it to Engelbert Humperdinck — ‘and if he doesn’t want

it, tell him to send it to Lulu! She can put it on a B-side!’ — I was coaxed back
to the vocal booth and completed the take. Then I yelled at Gus Dudgeon that
I hated it even more now it was finished and was going to kill him with my
bare hands if he put it on the album. Apart from that, it was great up at
Caribou. The studio was much plusher than the Chateau. You stayed in
beautiful log cabins, filled with antiques — the bed I slept in was supposed to
have belonged to Grover Cleveland, a nineteenth-century president of the
United States. There was a screening room for movies, and musicians passing
through Denver or Boulder would drop by to visit. Having obviously
forgiven me for the incident on the Starship, Stevie Wonder turned up one
day and took out a snowmobile, insisting on driving it himself. To pre-empt
your question: no, I have absolutely no idea how Stevie Wonder successfully
piloted a snowmobile through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado without
killing himself, or indeed anyone else, in the process, but he did.

One night we were finishing up, when I wandered into a room at the back
of the studio and spotted John fiddling with something on a table. He had a
straw and some white powder. I asked what it was, and he told me it was
cocaine. I asked what it did and he said, ‘Oh, it just makes you feel good.’ So
I asked if I could have some, and he said yes. The first line I snorted made me
retch. I hated the feeling in the back of my throat, that weird combination of
numbness brought on by the drug itself and a sort of powdery dryness from
whatever crap the coke had been cut with. I couldn’t get rid of it, no matter
how often I swallowed. I went out to the toilet and threw up. And then I
immediately went back into the room where John was and asked for another
line.

What the hell was I doing? I tried it, I hated it, it made me puke — hello?
Talk about God’s way of telling you to leave it at that. It’s hard to see how I
could have been given a clearer warning that this was a bad idea unless it had
started raining brimstone and I’d been visited by a plague of boils. So why
didn’t I leave it at that? Partly because throwing up didn’t stop the coke
affecting me, and I liked how it made me feel. That jolt of confidence and
euphoria, the sense that I could suddenly open up, that I didn’t feel shy or
intimidated, that I could talk to anybody. That was all bullshit, of course. I
was full of energy, I was inquisitive, I had a sense of humour and a thirst for

knowledge: I didn’t need a drug to make me talk to people. If anything,
cocaine gave me too much confidence for my own good. If I hadn’t been
coked out of my head when The Rolling Stones turned up in Colorado and
asked me to come onstage with them, I might have just performed ‘Honky
Tonk Women’, waved to the crowd and made my exit. Instead, I decided it
was going so well, I’d stay on and jam along to the rest of their set, without
first taking the precaution of asking the Stones if they wanted an auxiliary
keyboard player. For a while, I thought Keith Richards kept staring at me
because he was awestruck by the brilliance of my improvised contributions to
their oeuvre. After a few songs, it finally penetrated my brain that the
expression on his face wasn’t really suggestive of profound musical
appreciation. Actually, he looked remarkably like someone who was about to
inflict appalling violence on a musician who’d outstayed his welcome. I
quickly scuttled off, noting as I went that Keith was still staring at me in a
manner that suggested we’d be discussing this later, and decided it might be
best if I didn’t hang around for the after-show party.

But there was something more to cocaine than the way it made me feel.
Cocaine had a certain cachet about it. It was fashionable and exclusive. Doing
it was like becoming a member of an elite little clique, that secretly indulged
in something edgy, dangerous and illicit. Pathetically enough, that really
appealed to me. I’d become successful and popular, but I never felt cool.
Even back in Bluesology, I was the nerdy one, the one who didn’t look like a
pop star, who never quite carried off the hip clothes, who spent all his time in
record shops while the rest of the band were out getting laid and taking drugs.
And cocaine felt cool: the subtly coded conversations to work out who had
some, or who wanted some — who was part of the clique and who wasn’t —
the secretive visits to the bathrooms of clubs and bars. Of course, that was all
bullshit, too. I already was part of a club. Ever since my solo career had
begun, I’d been shown nothing but kindness and love by other artists. From
the minute I turned up in LA, musicians I adored and worshipped — people
who’d once just been mythic names on album sleeves and record labels — had
fallen over themselves to offer friendship and support. But when it finally
arrived, my success had happened so fast that, despite the warm welcome, I
couldn’t help but still feel slightly out of place, as if I didn’t quite belong.

As it tumed out, doing a line of coke then immediately going back for
another one was very me. I was never the kind of drug addict who couldn’t
get out of bed without a line, or who needed to take it every day. But once I
started, I couldn’t stop, until I was absolutely certain there was no cocaine
anywhere in the vicinity. I realized quite quickly that I had to get someone
else — a PA or a roadie — to look after my coke for me: not because I was too
grand or too scared to be the stash holder, but because if you left me in
charge of that evening’s supply of cocaine there would be none of it left by
teatime. My appetite for the stuff was unbelievable — enough to attract
comment in the circles I was moving in. Given that I was a rock star spending
a lot of time in seventies LA, this was a not inconsiderable feat. Once again,
you might think this would have given me pause for thought, but I’m afraid
the next sixteen years were full of incidents that would have given any
rational human being pause conceming their drug consumption, as we shall
discover. That was the problem. Because I was doing coke, I wasn’t a
rational human being anymore. You might tell yourself you’re fine, using as
evidence the fact that your drug use isn’t affecting your career. But you can’t
take that amount of coke and think in a sane and proper way. You become
unreasonable and irresponsible, self-obsessed, a law unto yourself. It’s your
way or the highway. It’s a horrible fucking drug.

I’d made the worst decision of my life, but I didn’t realize it then. By
contrast, the problems in my relationship with John were staring me in the
face. I said before that I was incredibly naive about gay relationships. One
thing I didn’t know was that John thought it was perfectly acceptable to have
sex with other people, behind my back. Open relationships are a lot more
common among gay men than straight couples, but that’s not what I wanted. I
was in love. When he realized that, it didn’t stop him being promiscuous, it
just made him dishonest about it. That led to some really humiliating scenes.
John vanished during a party at the director John Schlesinger’s house in LA. I
went looking for him and found him upstairs, in bed with someone. My mum
rang me up on tour to tell me that she’d popped round to the house in
Virginia Water and discovered John was hosting a sex party in my absence.
I’d confront him, there would be a huge row, things would calm down and
then he’d go out and do exactly the same thing again. Or, worse, he’d come

up with some new variant on sleeping around that seemed designed to send
me even more hysterical. I found out he’d gone to a film premiere, picked up
a famous TV actress and started an affair with her. Her. So now he was
fucking women as well. What was I supposed to do about that particular twist
in our relationship?

It went on and on and on, and it was miserable. I seemed to spend half my
life in tears over his behaviour, but it made absolutely no difference. So why
didn’t I leave him? Partly it was out of love. I’d fallen head over heels for
John, and when you’re like that with someone who cheats, you’!! make any
excuse for them, over and over again, kid yourself that this time they really
mean it and from now on it’s going to be OK. And, in his own way, John
really did love me. He was just completely incapable of keeping his dick in
his pants if left to his own devices.

I also stayed because I was scared of him. John had a temper that could
easily spill over into violence, especially if he’d been drinking or doing coke.
Sometimes his rages were unwittingly funny. I’d ring the offices of Rocket
and ask to speak to him: ‘Oh, he’s not here. He lost his temper and tried to
throw an electric typewriter down the stairs. But it was still plugged in, so
that didn’t really work. Which made him even more angry, so he fired the
entire staff and stormed out. We’re just wondering whether we should go
home or not.’ But most of the time, they weren’t funny at all. I watched John
threaten someone with a broken glass at a party hosted by Billy Gaff, Rod
Stewart’s manager. He hit a doorman outside a hotel in San Francisco after an
argument about parking a car. He punched a sound engineer in front of a
room full of American journalists at the launch of Goodbye Yellow Brick
Road. When we were touring in New Zealand in 1974, he threw a glass of
wine in the face of the local record label promotions guy when the party
they’d thrown for me ran out of whisky. When a female reporter from a local
paper tried to intervene, he punched her in the face. Later the same night, at a
different party, I got into an argument with another local journalist over the
earlier incident, which I hadn’t actually seen happen. John came flying across
the room, knocked him to the floor and started kicking him.

The next morning, we were both arrested and charged with assault. I was
acquitted, charged $50 costs, paid up and got out of New Zealand as quickly

as possible. I left without John, who had his appeal for bail turned down and
was eventually sentenced to twenty-eight days in Mount Eden prison. I flew
home without him. His behaviour was completely indefensible, but it was an
era in which the line between tough-guy rock manager and thug was
frequently blurred — look at Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin — and as I waited in
on a Saturday night for his weekly call from prison, I somehow managed to
construct a version of events in my head where he was the injured party,
acting nobly in my defence, aided by his claim that the female journalist had
called him a poof before he hit her, as if that justified it.

It wasn’t until John hit me that I came to my senses. It happened the night
we threw a fancy dress party at Hercules. I can’t even remember what the
argument was about, probably the latest episode in John’s catalogue of
cheating, but it started before the guests even got there and became more and
more heated. There was shouting, doors were slammed, and a beautiful art
deco mirror that Charlie Watts from The Rolling Stones had given us got
smashed. Then John dragged me into the bathroom and punched me in the
face, hard. I reeled backwards. I was so shocked, I didn’t retaliate. He
stormed out and I looked in the bathroom mirror. My nose was bleeding and
my face was cut. I cleaned myself up and the party went ahead as if nothing
had happened. Everyone had a great time — Derf turned up in drag, Tony
King arrived completely covered in gold paint, like Shirley Eaton in
Goldfinger. But something had happened and, to me, it felt like a switch had
finally been flicked off. I couldn’t make excuses for John’s behaviour any
longer. I couldn’t stay with someone who hit me.

I really don’t think John expected me to tell him it was over. Even after
he moved out, to a house on Montpelier Square in Knightsbridge, and I asked
my mum and Derf to help me find a place to live on my own — I literally
didn’t have time to go house-hunting myself — I think he was still in love with
me. I got the sense that if I’d asked him to come back, he would have been
there like a shot. But I didn’t want him back. I wanted him to stay as my
manager, but everything else about our relationship changed. The balance of
power shifted: until then, he’d been the dominant personality, but after we
broke up as a couple, I became more confident and assertive. He took on
other acts as a manager — not just musicians, comedians like Billy Connolly

and Barry Humphries — but our business relationship still worked, because I
knew how astute he was, and how great his ear was for music. One morning,
at the offices in South Audley Street, he said he wanted to play me something
by one of his new clients that was going to be a huge hit all over the world.
We listened to the song and I shook my head, incredulous.

“You’re not actually going to release that, are you?’

He frowned. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Well, for one thing, it’s about three hours long. For another, it’s the
campest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. And the title’s absolutely ridiculous
as well.’

John was completely unfazed. ‘I’m telling you now,’ he said, lifting the
test pressing of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ off the turntable, ‘that is going to be
one of the biggest records of all time.’

But if Queen’s most famous song sailed over my head at first, I got
Freddie Mercury straight away. From the minute I met him, I loved him. As
was tradition, he got given a drag name: Melina, after Melina Mercouri, the
Greek actress. He was just magnificent. Incredibly smart and adventurous.
Kind and generous and thoughtful, but outrageously funny. Oh God, if you
went out clubbing with him and Tony King — they were great friends — you’d
spend the whole night howling. No one was spared, not even the other
members of Queen: ‘Have you seen the guitarist, darling? Mrs May? Have
you seen what she wears onstage? Clogs! Fucking clogs! How did I end up
onstage with a guitarist who wears fucking clogs?’

And not Michael Jackson, who Freddie called Mahalia, a name I don’t
think Michael found anywhere near as hilarious as Freddie did. He had
incurred Freddie’s wrath by trying to interest him in his menagerie of
animals, and Freddie had turned retelling the story into a tour-de-force
performance that rivalled anything he did onstage. ‘Oh, darling! That
dreadful llama! All the way to California to see Mrs Jackson and she leads
me out into the garden and there’s the llama. Then she asks me to help get it
back into its pen! I was wearing a white suit and I got covered in mud, and
eventually I had to shout at her: “For fuck’s sake, Mahalia, get your fucking
llama away from me!” Oh,’ he would add, shuddering for comic effect, ‘it
was a nightmare, darling.’

SIX

I first met John Lennon through Tony King, who had moved to LA to
become Apple Records’ general manager in the US. In fact, the first time I
met John Lennon, he was dancing with Tony King. Nothing unusual in that,
other than the fact that they weren’t in a nightclub, there was no music
playing and Tony was in full drag as Queen Elizabeth I]. They were at
Capitol Records in Hollywood, where Tony’s new office was, shooting a TV
advert for John’s forthcoming album Mind Games, and, for reasons best
known to John, this was the big concept.

I took to him straight away. It wasn’t just that he was a Beatle and
therefore one of my idols. He was a Beatle who thought it was a good idea to
promote his new album by dancing around with a man dragged up as the
Queen, for fuck’s sake. I thought: We’re going to get on like a house on fire.
And I was right. As soon as we started talking, it felt like I’?d known him my
entire life.

We began spending a lot of time together, whenever I was in America.
He’d separated from Yoko and was living in Los Angeles with May Pang. I
know that period in his life is supposed to have been really troubled and
unpleasant and dark, but I’ve got to be honest, I never saw that in him at all. I
heard stories occasionally — about some sessions he’d done with Phil Spector
that went completely out of control, about him going crazy one night and
smashing up the record producer Lou Adler’s house. I could see a darkness in
some of the people he was hanging out with: Harry Nilsson was a sweet guy,
an incredibly talented singer and songwriter, but one drink too many and he’d
turn into someone else, someone you really had to watch yourself around.

And John and I certainly took a lot of drugs together and had some berserk
nights out, as poor old Dr John would tell you. We went to see him at the
Troubadour and he invited John onstage to jam. John was so pissed he ended
up playing the organ with his elbows. It somehow fell to me to get him
offstage.

In fact, you didn’t even need to go out to have a berserk night in John’s
company. One evening in New York, we were holed up in my suite at the
Sherry-Netherland hotel, determinedly making our way through a pile of
coke, when someone knocked at the door. My first thought was that it was
the police: if you’ve taken a lot of cocaine and someone unexpectedly knocks
at the door, your immediate thought is always that it’s the police. John
gestured at me to see who it was. I looked through the spyhole. My reaction
was a peculiar combination of relief and incredulity. ‘John,’ I whispered. ‘It’s
Andy Warhol.’

John shook his head frantically and drew his finger across his throat. ‘No
fucking way. Don’t answer it,’ he hissed.

“What?’ I whispered back. ‘What do you mean don’t answer it? It’s Andy
Warhol.’

There was more knocking. John rolled his eyes. ‘Has he got that fucking
camera with him?’ he asked.

I looked again through the spyhole and nodded. Andy took his Polaroid
camera everywhere.

‘Right,’ said John. ‘And do you want him coming in here taking photos
when you’ve got icicles of coke hanging out of your nose?’

I had to concede that I did not. “Then don’t fucking answer it,’ whispered
John, and we crept back to doing whatever we were doing, trying to ignore
the continued knocking of the world’s most famous pop artist.

But I genuinely never encountered that nasty, intimidating, destructive
aspect of John that people talk about, the biting, acerbic wit. I’m not trying to
paint some saintly posthumous portrait at all; I obviously knew that side of
him existed, I just never saw it first-hand. All I ever saw from him was
kindness and gentleness and fun, so much so that I took my mum and Derf to
meet him. We went out to dinner, and when John went to the toilet, Derf
thought it would be a great joke to take his false teeth out and put them in

John’s drink: there was something infectious about John’s sense of humour
that made people do things like that. Jesus, he was so funny. Whenever I was
with him — or even better, him and Ringo — I just laughed and laughed and
laughed.

We became so close that when his ex-wife Cynthia brought their son
Julian to New York to see him, he asked me and Tony to chaperone them on
their voyage over. We travelled to America on the SS France, this gorgeous
old ship, on its last voyage from Southampton to New York. Most of my
band and their partners came too. The other passengers were quite snooty
towards us — these rich, enormous American women saying things like, ‘He’s
supposed to be famous, but I’ve never heard of him,’ whenever I walked past
them — but in fairness, I had dyed my hair bright green and brought suitcases
filled with suits by the designer Tommy Nutter that were so loud they could
permanently damage your hearing. I could hardly complain about attracting
attention, adverse or otherwise. They liked me even less when I won the
bingo one afternoon, not least because I got overexcited and screamed
‘BINGO!’ at the top of my voice. I subsequently discovered that the correct
way to signify that you’d won on board the SS France was to graciously and
demurely murmur the word ‘house’. Well, that’s not how they teach you to
play bingo in Pinner, baby.

I didn’t care. I was having a blast: playing squash, going to the terrible
cabaret shows, which for some reason always ended with a rousing singalong
of ‘Hava Nagila’. Midway through the journey, I got a ship-to-shore call
telling me that my latest album, Caribou, which had been released in June
1974, had gone platinum. And I was writing its follow-up. Bernie had come
up with a set of songs about our early years together: they were all in
sequence and they kind of told our story. They were beautiful lyrics. Songs
about trying to write songs. Songs about no one wanting our songs. A song
about my stupid failed suicide attempt in Furlong Road and a song about the
weird relationship we had developed. The latter was called ‘We All Fall In
Love Sometimes’. It made me well up because it was true. I wasn’t in love
with Bernie physically, but I loved him like a brother; he was the best friend
Id ever had.

The lyrics were even easier than usual to write music for, which was just

as well, because they’d only let me use the music room for a couple of hours
a day during lunch. The rest of the time it was occupied by the ship’s
classical pianist. When I turned up, she would leave with a great display of
weary altruism, then head to a room directly above it and immediately strike
up again. Sometimes she’d have an opera singer with her, who was the star
turn at the aforementioned terrible cabaret. So I’d spend two hours trying to
drown them out. That was how Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt
Cowboy was written. I’d write a song — or sometimes two — every day during
lunch break, to the accompaniment of an aggrieved pianist hammering away
through the ceiling. And I’d have to remember them. I didn’t have a tape
recorder with me.

In New York, we stayed at the Pierre hotel on Fifth Avenue. John Lennon
was in the suite above mine, and called down. He wanted to play us the rough
mixes of his new album. Moreover, he wanted me to play on two of the
songs, ‘Surprise Surprise’ and ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’. The
second track sounded like a hit, even more so a couple of nights later when
we went to the Record Plant East studio, just off Times Square. The overdub
engineer was Jimmy Iovine, who ended up becoming one of the biggest
music moguls in the world, but John produced it himself and he worked
really quickly. Everyone thinks of John as someone who spent ages in the
studio experimenting, because of Sergeant Pepper and ‘Strawberry Fields’,
but he was fast, and he got bored easily, which was right up my street. By the
time we were finished, I was convinced it was going to be Number One. John
wasn’t: Paul had had number one solo singles, George had had number one
solo singles, Ringo had had number one solo singles, but he never had. So I
said we’d have a bet — if it got to Number One, he had to come onstage with
me. I just wanted to see him play live, which he’d hardly done at all since
The Beatles split up; a couple of appearances at benefit gigs and that was it.

To his credit, he didn’t try to shirk the bet when ‘Whatever Gets You
Thru The Night’ did make Number One, not even after he travelled up to a
show in Boston with Tony to see what he was getting himself into. I came
onstage for the encore wearing something that basically resembled a little
heart-shaped chocolate box with a tunic attached to it, and John turned to
Tony, looking a bit aghast, and said, ‘Fucking hell, is this what rock and

roll’s all about nowadays, then?’

But he still played with us at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving
1974, on the condition that we made sure Yoko didn’t come: they were still
estranged. Of course, Yoko turned up anyway — which I have to say is very
Yoko — but Tony made sure her tickets were out of the sightline of the stage.
Before the show, she sent John a gardenia, which he wore in his buttonhole
onstage. I’m not sure whether that was what made him so nervous
beforehand, or if it was just because he didn’t know what to expect when he
walked out. But either way, he was suddenly terrified. He threw up before the
show. He even tried to get Bernie to come onstage with him, but to no avail:
Bernie always hated the limelight, and not even a desperate Beatle could
convince him to change his mind.

In my whole career, I’ve honestly never heard a crowd make a noise like
the one they made when I introduced him. It just went on and on and on. But
I knew how they felt. I was as giddy about it as they were, so were the rest of
the band. It was probably the highlight of our careers to that point, to have
someone like that share a stage with you. The three songs flew by, and he
was off. He came back for the encore, this time with Bernie in tow, both of
them playing tambourines on ‘The Bitch Is Back’. It was fabulous.

After the show, Yoko came backstage. We all ended up back at the Pierre
hotel — me, John, Yoko, Tony and John Reid. We were sat in a booth having
a drink and — as if the whole situation wasn’t peculiar enough — Uri Geller
suddenly materialized out of nowhere, came over to our table and started
bending all the spoons and forks on it. Then he began doing his mind-reading
act. It had been a bizarre day. But ultimately it led to John reuniting with
Yoko, having Sean — my godson — and retreating into a life of domestic
contentment in the Dakota Building. I was happy for him, even if I could
think of better places to retreat into domestic contentment in than the Dakota.
There was something really sinister about that building, the architecture of it.
Just looking at it gave me the creeps. You know, Roman Polanski chose to
film Rosemary’s Baby there for a reason.

vf

Recording Captain Fantastic had turned out to be as easy as writing it. The

sessions were a breeze: we had gone back to Caribou in the summer of 1974
and taped the songs in the order they appear on the album, as though we were
telling the story as we went along. We had knocked out a couple of singles,
too, a cover of ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ that John played guitar and
sang backing vocals on, and ‘Philadelphia Freedom’, which is one of the few
songs I ever commissioned Bernie to write. Normally, I just let him write
lyrics about whatever he wanted — we’d learned we couldn’t really write to
order back in the days when we kept trying to write singles for Tom Jones or
Cilla Black and failing miserably — but Billie Jean King had asked me to
write a theme song for her tennis team, the Philadelphia Freedoms. I couldn’t
refuse; I adored Billie Jean. We’d met at a party in LA a year before, and
she’d become one of my best friends. It seems a strange comparison, but she
and John Lennon reminded me of each other. They were both really driven,
they were both kind, they both loved to laugh, they both felt really strongly
that they could use their fame to change things. John was politically engaged,
Billie was a huge pioneer for feminism, for gay rights, for women’s rights in
sport, not just tennis. All today’s huge female tennis stars should get on their
knees and thank her, because she was the one who had the guts to turn round
when she won the US Open and say, ‘You have to give women the same
prize money as men, or I’m not playing next year’. I just love her to death.

Perhaps understandably, Bernie wasn’t hugely enamoured with the idea
of writing about tennis — it’s not exactly the ideal topic for a pop song — so
instead, he wrote about the city of Philadelphia. That worked perfectly,
because the song’s sound was influenced by the music that was coming out of
the city at the time: The O’ Jays, MFSB, Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes.
That was the music I heard when I went out to gay clubs in New York:
Crisco Disco, Le Jardin and 12 West. I loved them, even though Crisco Disco
once refused to let me in. I was with Divine, too, the legendary drag queen. I
know, I know: Elton John and Divine getting turned away from a gay club.
But he was wearing a kaftan, I had on a brightly coloured jacket and they said
we were overdressed: ‘Whaddaya think this is? Fuckin’ Halloween?’

You didn’t go to those places to pick up guys, or at least I didn’t. I just
went there to dance, and if there was someone there at the end of the night,
then great. No drugs, except maybe poppers. You didn’t need them. The

music was enough: ‘Honey Bee’ by Gloria Gaynor, ‘I?ll Always Love My
Mama’ by The Intruders. Fabulous records, really inspiring, brave music. We
got Gene Page, who arranged all Barry White’s records, to do the strings on
‘Philadelphia Freedom’ and we got the sound and style right. We must have
done — a few months after it came out, MFSB covered it and named an album
after it.

‘Philadelphia Freedom’ went platinum in America, then a few months
later, Captain Fantastic became the first album in history to go straight into
the US charts at Number One. I was everywhere in 1975. Not just on the
radio: everywhere. I was in amusement arcades — Bally made a Captain
Fantastic pinball machine. I was on black TV: one of the first white artists
ever to be invited to appear on Soul Train. I was interviewed by the
exceptionally laid-back Don Cornelius, who took a shine to yet another
Tommy Nutter creation I was wearing, this time with huge lapels and brown
and gold pinstripes: “Hey, brother, where did you get that suit?’

But I was still keen to keep moving. I decided to change the band and let
Dee and Nigel go. I rang them myself. They took the news quite well — Dee
was more upset than Nigel, but there wasn’t a huge row or a feeling of bad
blood from either of them. I feel worse about it now than I did at the time. It
must have been devastating for them — they’d been integral for years and we
were at the peak of our careers. Back then, I was always looking forward, and
I felt in my gut that I needed to revamp our sound: make it funkier and
harder-driving. I brought in Caleb Quaye on guitar and Roger Pope on drums,
who’d played on Empty Sky and Tumbleweed Connection, and two American
session musicians, James Newton Howard and Kenny Passarelli, on
keyboards and bass.

I auditioned another American guitarist as well, but it wasn’t a success.
For one thing, it didn’t gel musically, and for another he freaked out everyone
else in the band by telling us that he liked fucking chickens up the arse, then
cutting their heads off. Apparently when you do that their sphincters contract
and it makes you come. I couldn’t work out whether he had an absolutely
horrendous sense of humour or an absolutely horrendous sex life. There
aren’t many rules in rock and roll, but there are some: follow your gut
musical instincts, make sure you read the small print before you sign and, if

at all possible, try not to form a band with someone who fucks chickens up
the arse and decapitates them. Or even talks about it. Whichever it is, it’s
going to wear on your nerves after a while if you have to share a hotel room
with them.

There was one other complication. Bernie’s marriage to Maxine had
broken up, and she’d started having an affair with Kenny Passarelli. So my
new bass player was sleeping with my songwriting partner’s wife. It was
obviously really hurtful for Bernie, but I had enough going on in my own life
without getting embroiled in other people’s relationships.

I took the new band to Amsterdam to rehearse. The rehearsals were
fantastic — we were an absolutely shit-hot band — but the days off were
bedlam: it turned out we were absolutely shit-hot at taking drugs, too. Tony
King turned up with Ringo Starr and we all went on a boat trip along the
canals, which swiftly degenerated into a mammoth drug fest. It was
completely debauched. I’m afraid the aesthetic loveliness of the
Grachtengordel went entirely unnoticed that day. Everybody was too busy
doing coke and blowing spliff smoke into each other’s mouths. Ringo got so
stoned that, at one point, he asked if he could join the band. At least, that’s
what people told me afterwards — I didn’t hear him. If he did, he probably
forgot he said it about ninety seconds after the words came out of his mouth.

One of the reasons I was taking so many drugs was because I was
heartbroken. I’d fallen in love with someone who was straight and didn’t love
me. I spent so much time in my hotel room weeping and listening to 10CC’s
‘’m Not In Love’ that Tony eventually had a gold disc made up and
presented me with it: to Elton John for a million plays of ‘I’m Not In Love’.

In fact, since I had broken up with John, my personal life had been, more
or less, a disaster. I’d fall in love with straight men all the time, chase after
the thing I couldn’t have. Sometimes it went on for months and months, this
madness of thinking that today was the day you’d get a phone call from them
saying ‘oh, by the way, I love you’, despite the fact that they’d told you it
was never going to happen.

Or I’d see someone I liked the look of in a gay bar and before I’d actually
spoken to them, I’d be hopelessly in love, convinced this was the man I was
fated to share the rest of my life with and mentally sketching out a wonderful

future. It was always the same type of guy. Blond, blue eyes, good-looking
and younger than me, so I could smother them with a kind of fatherly love —
the sort of love I suppose I thought I’d missed out on myself as a kid. I didn’t
pick them up so much as take them hostage. ‘Right, you have to give up what
you’re doing, come on the road, fly round the world with me.’ I’d buy them
the watch and the shirt and the cars, but eventually these boys had no reason
to be, except to be with me, and I was busy, so they’d be left on the sidelines.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was taking their existence away from them.
And after three or four months they’d end up resenting it, I’d end up getting
bored with them, and it would end in tears. And then I’d get someone else to
get rid of them for me and start again. It was absolutely dreadful behaviour:
I’d have one leaving at the airport at the same time as the new one was flying
in.

It was a decadent era, and plenty of other pop stars were behaving in a
similar way — Rod Stewart occasionally let girls know he’d finished with
them by just leaving a plane ticket on their bed, so he wasn’t going to win
any awards for chivalry either. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I
knew this can’t be right.

I had to have some arm-candy, though, someone to talk to. I couldn’t
stand being on my own. There was no solitude, no reflection. I had to be with
people. I was incredibly immature. I was still the little boy from Pinner Hill
Road underneath it all. The events, the shows, the records, the success were
all great, but when I was away from that, I wasn’t an adult, I was a teenager. I
had been completely wrong when I thought that changing my name meant I’d
changed as a person. I wasn’t Elton, I was Reg. And Reg was still the same as
he’d been fifteen years ago, hiding in his bedroom while his parents fought:
insecure and body-conscious and self-loathing. I didn’t want to go home to
him at night. If I did, the misery could be all-consuming.

One night, while I was recording with the new band up at Caribou
studios, I took an overdose of Valium before I went to bed. Twelve tablets. I
can’t remember what exactly prompted me to do that, although it was
probably some catastrophic love affair gone wrong. When I woke up the next
day, I panicked, rushed downstairs and called Connie Pappas, who worked
with John Reid, and told her what I’d done. While I was talking to her, I

blacked out. James Newton Howard heard me collapse and carried me back
upstairs to my room. They called a doctor, who prescribed me pills for my
nerves. With the benefit of hindsight, that seems quite an odd thing to do to
someone who’s just tried to finish himself off with a load of pills for his
nerves, but they must have helped, at least in the short term — the sessions got
finished.

ee SR

The new band’s first show was at London’s Wembley Stadium on 21 June
1975. It was more like a one-day festival than a gig, called Midsummer
Music. I’d picked the bill myself: a band signed to our label, Rocket, called
Stackridge, Rufus with Chaka Khan, Joe Walsh, The Eagles and The Beach
Boys. They were all great. The audience loved them. For my headlining set, I
played Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy in its entirety, all ten
songs, from start to finish. It was the biggest show I’d ever played.
Everything was perfect — the sound, the support acts, even the weather. And
it was an unmitigated disaster.

Here’s something I learned. If you’ve elected to come onstage
immediately after The Beach Boys — whose set has consisted of virtually
every hit from one of the most incredible and best-loved catalogues of hits in
the history of pop music — it’s a really, really bad idea to play ten new songs
in a row that no one in the audience is particularly familiar with, because the
album they come from was only released a couple of weeks ago.
Unfortunately, I learned this vital lesson about three or four songs into the
Wembley performance, when I sensed a restlessness in the crowd, the way
schoolkids get restless during a particularly long assembly. We ploughed on.
We sounded wonderful — like I said, we were a shit-hot band. People started
to leave. I was terrified. It was years since I’d lost an audience. The feeling I
used to get onstage in the clubs when Long John Baldry insisted on playing
‘The Threshing Machine’ or doing his Della Reese impersonation came
flooding back.

The obvious thing to do would be to turn it around and start playing the
hits. But I couldn’t. For one thing, it was a matter of artistic integrity. And for
another, I’d made a big speech when we came onstage about performing the

album in full. I couldn’t just suddenly strike up with ‘Crocodile Rock’
halfway through. Fuck. I’d have to stick with it. I could already imagine what
the reviews were going to be like, and I was only half an hour into the show.
We kept going. The songs still sounded wonderful. More people left. I started
thinking about the big celebratory post-gig party that was planned. It was
going to be filled with stars who were supposed to have been dazzled by my
performance: Billie Jean, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr. Great. This is just
fucking wonderful. I’m screwing up in front of 82,000 people and half The
Beatles.

We eventually got round to the hits, but it was too little, too late, as the
reviews quite rightly pointed out. We went back to America, having been
taught both a lesson in the perils of artistic integrity and that you’re never too
successful to fall flat on your arse.

I was spending more and more time over in the States, so much that it
made sense to rent a house in LA. I found one at the top of Tower Grove
Drive, which I eventually bought. It was a Spanish Colonial-style house that
had been built for the silent movie star John Gilbert. He’d lived there while
he was having an affair with Greta Garbo. There was a hut in the garden by a
waterfall, and that was allegedly where Garbo slept when she wanted to be
alone.

It was a nice neighbourhood, although a house nearby did burn down
shortly after I moved there. The fire allegedly started because the owner was
freebasing cocaine, something I very much frowned on. Cooking up drugs
meant that you were a druggie, which — with the help of some remarkably
convoluted internal logic — I had worked out that I definitely wasn’t, despite
some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary. I would stay up all night on
coke, then not touch it for six months. So I wasn’t an addict. I was fine.

It was a beautiful house, and I employed a housekeeper called Alice to
look after the place and nurse me through my hangovers. I filled it with all
the stuff I was collecting — art nouveau, art deco, Bugatti furniture, Gallé
lamps, Lalique, incredible posters — but I only really lived in three rooms: my
bedroom, the TV room and the snooker room. Actually, I mostly used the
snooker room to seduce guys. Strip snooker! It usually seemed to do the trick,
especially after a couple of lines of coke.

That was another reason I took a lot of coke: I found it was an
aphrodisiac, which is strange, because for most people it kills the erection
side of things completely. Never a problem for me, I’m afraid. Quite the
opposite. If I took enough coke I could stay hard for days. And I liked the
fantasy of it: I did things on coke that I would never have had the courage to
do or try if I hadn’t been. It takes all the inhibitions out of people. Even
straight guys sometimes. You gave them a couple of lines and they’d do stuff
they wouldn’t ordinarily do in a million years. Then regret it in the morning, I
suppose — or occasionally come back for more.

But I was never actually into fucking that much. I was an observer, a
voyeur. I’d kind of set up my perversion, have two or three guys doing things
for me to watch. That was where my sexual pleasure came from, getting a
bunch of people who wouldn’t normally have sex with each other, to have
sex with each other. But I didn’t really participate. I just watched, took
Polaroids, organized things. The only problem was that I was incredibly
houseproud, so they’d end up having sex on the snooker table with me
shouting, ‘Make sure you don’t come on the baize!’ which tended to puncture
the atmosphere a bit. Not being that interested in having sex myself is the
reason I never got HIV. If I had been, I’d almost certainly be dead.

Tower Grove Drive tumed into a big party house, the place everyone
came back to after a night out. LA was the centre of the music industry in the
mid-seventies. Plus, LA had amazing gay clubs: the After Dark and Studio
One. The first was a disco, quite underground; the second had cabaret. It was
where I saw Eartha Kitt, who I’d loved when I was a kid, although strictly
speaking I didn’t actually see Eartha Kitt perform. I went backstage to meet
her before the show and her opening words to me were: ‘Elton John. I never
liked anything you did.’ Oh, really? Well, thanks for your frank and honest
appraisal. I think I’ll go home.

If Dusty Springfield was around, we’d go to the roller derby to see the LA
Thunderbirds. It was so camp and fabulous, all scripted, like wrestling, but
lesbians loved it — it was basically a load of dykes whizzing round on skates
and fighting each other. And we’d have fantastic lunch and dinner parties.
Franco Zeffirelli came for lunch and revealed that his close friends called him
Irene. Simon and Garfunkel had dinner one night, then played charades. At

least, they tried to play charades. They were terrible at it. The best thing I can
say about them is that they were better than Bob Dylan. He couldn’t get the
hang of the ‘how many syllables?’ thing at all. He couldn’t do ‘sounds like’
either, come to think of it. One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest
man of letters in the history of rock music, and he can’t seem to tell you
whether a word’s got one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymes with! He
was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the
next morning, by a cackling Tony King. That’s not really a phone call you
want to receive when you’re struggling with a hangover. ‘Morning, darling —
do you remember throwing oranges at Bob Dylan last night?’ Oh God.

There was a strange, dark undercurrent to LA, too. The Manson murders
still hung over the place six years on. They’d left this weird sense that you
were never really safe there, even in a big house in Beverly Hills. These days,
everyone has security guards and CCTV, but no one did then, not even the
former Beatles, which is why I woke up one morning to find a girl sitting on
the end of my bed, staring at me. I couldn’t get up, because I never wore
anything when I slept. All I could do was sit there screaming at her to get the
fuck out. She didn’t say anything back, she just kept staring, which was
somehow worse than if she’d spoken. Eventually the housekeeper came down
and got her out of there. It scared the shit out of me — we couldn’t work out
how the hell she’d got in.

But you didn’t need a stalker to alert you to LA’s dark side. One night, I
went to see the Average White Band play at the Troubadour. They were so
fantastic that I got onstage and jammed with them, dragging Cher and Martha
Reeves up with me. After the gig, I took the band out to a place called Le
Restaurant, which served great food and didn’t frown on outré behaviour: the
management hadn’t even blanched at John Reid’s birthday party, which was
extremely tolerant of them, given that a friend had brought the horse he
bought John as a present into the restaurant and it had immediately shat on
the floor. We stayed out until 6 am. There was something lovely about
spending time with them, a young British band just on the verge of becoming
huge, playing a residency at the Troubadour and boggling at the prospect of
making it in America: they reminded me of me five years before. But two
days later, I got a phone call from John Reid, telling me the Average White

Band’s drummer, Robbie, was dead. They’d gone to another party the
following night, up in the Hollywood Hills, and taken heroin some creep had
given them, thinking it was cocaine. He died in his hotel room a few hours
later.

I suppose it could have happened anywhere, but his death seemed to sum
up LA. It could feel like a place where the tired old line about dreams coming
true wasn’t a tired old line but a statement of fact. It was the city where, more
or less, I’d become a star; where I’d been feted by my idols; where I’d
somehow ended up taking tea with Mae West (to my delight, she swanned in
with a lascivious smile and the words, ‘Ah, my favourite sight — a room full
of men’, which, given that the men present were me, John Reid and Tony
King, suggested she was in for an evening of disappointment). But if you
didn’t keep your wits about you — if you took a wrong turn or kept the wrong
company — LA could just as easily swallow you up.

Se Oo

The mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Watson, declared the 20—26 October 1975
Elton John Week. Among other things, I was to have a star unveiled on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame, right outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. There
were two gigs booked at Dodger Stadium, an audience of 55,000 at each. I’d
played to larger crowds than that — there were 82,000 people at Wembley
Stadium, or at least there had been before they decided they’d had enough
and started storming the exits — but the Dodger gigs still seemed like a zenith.
I was the first artist who’d been allowed to play there since The Beatles in
1966, when the promoter hadn’t booked enough security staff. There had
been a kind of mini riot at the end of The Beatles’ set, and the stadium’s
owners had subsequently banned rock gigs. And there was a peculiar sense of
homecoming about them, given that my career had really taken off at the
Troubadour five years previously.

So I chartered a Boeing 707 plane through Pan Am and flew my mum and
Derf, my grandma and a load of my friends over from England, along with
the staff of Rocket, journalists and media and a TV documentary crew
fronted by the chat show host Russell Harty. I met them on the runway with
Tony King and a fleet of Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs: the kind of welcome

I’d been expecting the first time I got to America, instead of that fucking
double-decker bus. I suppose it was quite an outrageous thing to do, but I
wanted my family to see it; I wanted them to have the time of their lives; I
wanted them to be proud of me.

Elton John Week passed in a blur. My family went on trips to Disneyland
and Universal Studios. There was a party on John Reid’s yacht, Madman, to
celebrate the release of Rock of the Westies. The grand unveiling of the star
on the Hollywood Walk of Fame turned out to be a bit naff. I was wearing a
lime-green Bob Mackie suit, covered in the names of other Walk of Fame
stars, and matching bowler hat. I had to travel there on a gold-painted golf
cart with an enormous pair of illuminated glasses and a bow tie stuck to the
front of it. I’m aware that I was hardly the model of shy understatement
onstage, but there were limits. There’s footage of it on YouTube, and if you
look at the expression on my face, it’s pretty clear what a wonderful idea I
thought that was. I don’t know if you’ve ever been driven very slowly
through a crowd of screaming fans, in full view of the world’s media, on a
gold-painted golf cart with a pair of enormous illuminated glasses and a bow
tie on the front, but if you haven’t, I can tell you that it’s a pretty excruciating
experience.

I felt incredibly awkward and tried to defuse the situation by pulling faces
during the speeches and making jokes when my turn came to speak — ‘I now
declare this supermarket open!’ — but I couldn’t wait for it to be over and
done with. Afterwards, they told me that it was the first time in the history of
the Walk of Fame that so many fans had turned up to an unveiling, they had
to close Hollywood Boulevard completely.

The next day, I invited my family over to lunch at Tower Grove Drive.
Like Captain Fantastic, Rock of the Westies went straight into the US album
charts at Number One. No one had ever done that before — not Elvis, not The
Beatles — and now I’d done it twice, in the space of six months. I was twenty-
eight years old and I was, for the moment, the biggest pop star in the world. I
was about to play the most prestigious gigs of my career. My family and
friends were there, happily sharing in my success. And that was when I
decided to try and commit suicide again.

Again, I can’t remember exactly what provoked me to do it, but as my

family were eating I got up from the table by the swimming pool, went
upstairs and swallowed a load of Valium. Then I came back down in my
dressing gown and announced that I’d taken a bunch of tablets and that I was
going to die. And then I threw myself in the pool.

I can’t remember exactly how many tablets I swallowed, but it was fewer
than I’d taken that night at Caribou studios — a sign that, deep down, I had
absolutely no intention of actually killing myself. This fact was brought very
sharply into focus when I felt the dressing gown start to weigh me down. For
someone who was supposed to be in the process of trying to end it all — who
was apparently convinced that life had nothing more to offer him and was
filled with a longing for death’s merciful release — I suddenly became
surprisingly keen not to drown. I started frantically swimming to the side of
the pool. Someone helped me get out. The thing I remember most clearly is
hearing my grandmother’s voice pipe up. ‘Oh,’ she said. And then, in a
noticeably aggrieved tone — unmistakably the voice of an elderly working-
class lady from Pinner who’s realized her wonderful holiday in California is
suddenly in danger of being cut short — she added: ‘We might as well
bleedin’ go home, then.’

I couldn’t stop myself laughing. That might have been exactly the
response I needed. I was looking for ‘oh, you poor thing’, but instead I got
‘why are you behaving like such a twat?’

It was a good question: why was I behaving like such a twat? I suppose I
was doing something dramatic to try and get attention. I realize that, on one
level, it sounds nuts, given that I was living in a city that had declared it was
Elton John Week, I was about to play in front of 110,000 people, and there
was an ITV camera crew in the process of making a documentary about me.
How much more attention can a man need? But I was looking for a different
kind of attention from that. I was trying to make my family understand that
there was something wrong, however well my career was going: it might
seem that it’s all great, it might seem that my life is perfect, but it’s not. I
couldn’t say to them, ‘I think I’m taking too many drugs’, because they
would never understand; they didn’t know what cocaine was. I hadn’t got the
guts to tell them, ‘Look, I’m really not feeling very good, I need a bit of
love’, because I didn’t want them to see any cracks in the facade at all. I was

too strong-willed — and too afraid of her reaction — to just take my mum aside
and say, ‘Listen, Mum, I really need to talk to you — I’m not doing very well
here, I need a bit of help, what do you think?’ Instead of doing that, I bottled
it up and bottled it up and then eventually I went off like Vesuvius and staged
this ridiculous suicide bid. That’s who I am: it’s all or nothing. It wasn’t my
family’s fault at all, it was mine. I was too proud to admit that my life wasn’t
perfect. It was pathetic.

They called a doctor. I refused to go to hospital and have my stomach
pumped, so he gave me this hideous liquid that made me vomit. And as soon
as I threw up, I felt all right: ‘OK, I’m better now. So, anyway, I’ve got these
two gigs to do.’ It sounds ridiculous — it was ridiculous — but I bounced back
very quickly from my deathbed: right, I’ve tried to commit suicide, done that,
what’s next? If anyone around me thought that was strange, they kept it to
themselves. And twenty-four hours later I was onstage at Dodger Stadium.

The shows were a complete triumph. That’s the thing about playing live,
for me at least. Even now, whatever turmoil I might be going through just
gets pushed aside. Back then, when I was onstage I just felt different from
when I was offstage. It was the only time I really felt in control of what I did.

They were huge events. Cary Grant was backstage, looking incredibly
beautiful. I had gospel singers, James Cleveland’s Southern California
Community Choir, performing with me. I had Billie Jean King come out and
sing backing vocals on ‘Philadelphia Freedom’. I had the security guards
dressed in ridiculous lilac one-piece jumpsuits with frills. I had California’s
most famous used-car dealer, a man called Cal Worthington, come on with a
lion — Christ knows why, but I suppose it all added to the general gaiety.
Even Bernie put in an appearance in front of the audience, which was almost
unheard of.

I wore a sequinned Dodgers uniform and cap, designed by Bob Mackie. I
climbed on top of the piano and swung a baseball bat around. I hammered at
the piano keys until my fingers split and bled. We played for three hours and
I loved it. I know how to pull off a show because of all those years I spent in
clubs, backing Major Lance or playing with Bluesology to twenty people;
I’ve got the experience, so my gigs are never really below a certain standard.
But sometimes, something else happens onstage: from the minute you start

playing you just know you can do no wrong. It’s as if your hands are moving
independently of your brain; you don’t even have to concentrate, you just feel
as free as a bird, you can do anything you want. Those are the gigs you live
for, and Dodger Stadium was like that, on both days. The sound was perfect,
so was the weather. I can remember standing onstage, feeling the adrenalin
coursing through me.

It was a pinnacle, and I was smart enough to know that it couldn’t last, at
least not at that pitch. Success on that level never does; it doesn’t matter who
you are, or how great you are, your records aren’t going to enter the charts at
Number One forever. I knew someone or something else was going to come
along. I was waiting for that moment to happen, and the thought of it didn’t
scare me at all. It was almost a relief when the second single from Rock of the
Westies, ‘Grow Some Funk Of Your Own’, wasn’t a huge hit. For one thing,
I was exhausted: exhausted from touring, exhausted from giving interviews,
exhausted by the ongoing catastrophe that was my personal life. And for
another, I’d never really set out to have hit singles. I was an album artist, who
made records like Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water,
and I’d inadvertently become this huge singles machine, having smash after
smash after smash, none of which had been intentionally written to be hit
singles.

In fact, one of the few times I ever sat down and tried to write a hit single
was at the end of 1975. I was on holiday in Barbados with a big group of
friends: Bernie was there, Tony King, Kiki Dee, lots of people. I thought we
should write a duet for Kiki and me to sing. Bernie and I came up with two.
One was called ‘I’m Always On The Bonk’: ‘I don’t know who I’m fucking,
I don’t know who I’m sucking, but I’m always on the bonk’. The other was
‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’. I wrote the melody on the piano, came up
with the title and then Bernie finished it off. He hated the end result, and I
can’t really blame him — Bernie was not, and is not, a fan of anything he
thinks is shallow pop music. But even he had to admit it had substantially
more commercial potential than ‘I’m Always On The Bonk’.

seven

I only agreed to do an interview with Rolling Stone because I was bored out
of my mind. The 1976 Elton John world tour was supposed to be a journalist-
free zone. I didn’t need to do any press to promote it, because every date had
sold out instantly. But I’d been stuck in a suite at the Sherry-Netherland in
New York for two weeks — we were playing a run of shows at Madison
Square Garden — and I’d completely run out of things to do when I wasn’t
onstage.

It was hard to get out of the hotel. It was August, and Manhattan was
unbearably hot, but there was a crowd of fans permanently stationed outside
the entrance. If I managed to get past them, wherever I went, there was chaos.
I'd literally seen little old ladies get knocked over and trampled by people
who were trying to get a look at me, not a sight designed to make you feel
good about your celebrity. Still, I’d tried to keep myself occupied. I’d been to
see, or been visited by, everyone I knew that was in town. I’d been out
clubbing to 12 West and visited a radio station called WNEW. They’d given
me champagne, an act of generosity they swiftly came to regret when I went
on air immediately afterwards and offered listeners my full and frank
appraisal of a rock critic called John Rockwell, who’d given me a bad live
review: ‘I bet he’s got smelly feet. I bet he’s got bogeys up his nose.’ I went
shopping, although I realized I might have exhausted the possibilities of retail
therapy when I found myself buying a cuckoo clock that, instead of a cuckoo,
had a large wooden penis that popped in and out of it every hour. I gave it to
John Lennon when I went to visit him. I thought it was a good present for a
man who had everything. John and Yoko were as bad as me when it came to

shopping. The various apartments they owned in the Dakota were so full of
priceless artworks, antiques and clothes that I once sent them a card,
rewriting the lyrics to ‘Imagine’: ‘Imagine six apartments, it isn’t hard to do,
one is full of fur coats, another’s full of shoes’. They owned herds of cows,
for God’s sake — prize Holstein cattle. Years later, I asked what had happened
to them. Yoko shrugged and said: ‘Oh, I got rid of them. All that mooing.’

But, having delivered a penis-themed cuckoo clock to John Lennon, I had
nothing else to do, or at least nothing that I wanted to do enough to see a little
old lady get hospitalized in the process. I just mooched around the hotel. The
band certainly weren’t in the mood to hang out with me, because I'd fired
them all the night before last, just before we went onstage.

It had been a weird tour. Commercially, it had been a huge success, and,
on one level, it had been fun. Kiki Dee had come along with us to sing ‘Don’t
Go Breaking My Heart’, which, despite Bernie’s profound misgivings, went
to Number One on both sides of the Atlantic that summer. In Britain, we’d
travelled around by car, visiting the tourist sites between shows, stopping off
for ice creams and ducking into pubs for lunch. In America, the shows had
been massive events — Hollywood stars backstage; a big performance in
Massachusetts for the American Bicentennial on 4 July, where I dressed up as
the Statue of Liberty; a guest appearance from Divine, who shimmied away
around the band despite the fact that one of his high heels broke off the
minute he got onstage.

And I met Elvis Presley, backstage at the Capital Centre in Landover,
Maryland, a couple of nights before I played there myself. I took Bernie with
me, and my mum. It seemed to make sense: Mum had introduced me to
Elvis’s music; now I was going to introduce her to Elvis himself. We were
ushered into a dressing room full of people: I was used to rock stars who
went everywhere mob-handed, but I’d never seen anything like Elvis’s
entourage. He was surrounded by cousins, old buddies from back home in
Memphis, people who seemed to be employed specifically to hand him
drinks and towels. When I squeezed past them to shake his hand, my heart
broke. There was something desperately, visibly wrong with him. He was
overweight, grey and sweating. There were expressionless black holes where
his eyes should have been. He moved like a man coming round from a

general anaesthetic, weird and sluggish. There was a trickle of black hair dye
running down his forehead. He was completely gone, barely coherent.

Our meeting was short and painfully stilted. I was simultaneously
starstruck and horrified, which is hardly a recipe for sparkling conversation.
And Elvis ... well, I couldn’t work out whether Elvis just had no idea who I
was — there seemed every chance he had no idea who anyone was — or
whether he knew perfectly well and wasn’t very pleased to see me. Everyone
knew that Elvis wasn’t keen on competition — there was a crazy rumour going
around that when he visited Richard Nixon in the White House, he had
literally complained to the US president about The Beatles — and, a couple of
years before, I’d been contacted by his ex-wife Priscilla, saying that their
daughter Lisa Marie was a huge fan, and asking if I would meet her as a
birthday treat. We had tea together at my house in LA. Maybe he was angry
about that.

I asked him if he was going to play ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and he grunted in
a way that strongly implied he wasn’t. I asked for his autograph and saw his
hands shaking as he picked up the pen. The signature was just about legible.
Then we went to watch the show. Occasionally, you would see something
spark, a flash of the incredible artist he had been. It would last for a couple of
lines of a song and vanish again. My main memory is of him handing out
scarves to women in the audience. In the past he’d been famous for giving
away silk scarves onstage, a grand gesture befitting the King of Rock and
Roll. But times had clearly changed, and these scarves were cheap, nylon
things: they didn’t look like they would last long. Nor did Elvis, as Mum
pointed out.

‘He’ ll be dead next year,’ she said, as we left. She was right.

But for weeks afterwards, I couldn’t stop turning over our meeting in my
mind. It wasn’t just that he was in such a bad way, although that was
incredible in itself — the last thing I’d expected to feel when I finally met
Elvis was pity. It was that I could understand a little too easily how he ended
up like that, closeted away from the outside world. Maybe he’d just spent too
much time trapped in expensive hotels with nothing to do. Maybe he’d just
seen one little old lady too many stretchered away and decided the outside
world wasn’t worth the bother.

For all its success, the tour had felt very familiar: the stadiums, the
Starship, the celebrities, even the set we played. We had a new album
recorded, a double called Blue Moves, but it wasn’t due out until the autumn,
and I’d learned my lesson about inflicting new material on an unsuspecting
audience at Wembley the year before. Especially if the material was like the
stuff on Blue Moves. I’m very proud of it, but the music was complex and
hard to play, quite experimental and jazz-influenced. And its mood was very
sombre and reflective: Bernie pouring his heart out about his divorce from
Maxine and me writing music to match. I even wrote some lyrics myself, the
opening lines of ‘Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word’, the fallout from
another disastrous infatuation with a straight guy: ‘What can I do to make
you love me? What can I do to make you care?’ It’s a great album, but it’s
not exactly the work of two people who are cartwheeling down the street,
overflowing with the joys of life.

And that was the real problem with the tour. The holiday in Barbados had
been great, but it seemed like a distant memory. I was back in exactly the
same place emotionally as I had been when I threw myself into the swimming
pool in LA. My mum and Derf had found me a new home, called Woodside.
It certainly sounded nice — a huge mock-Georgian house in Old Windsor,
with thirty-seven acres of land — but I couldn’t tell you for sure how nice it
was, because I had hardly been there since I moved in. I’d had enough time to
ask Derf to build some shelves for my record collection, and to install a small
menagerie of pets: a rabbit called Clarence, a cockatoo called Ollie and
Roger, a mynah bird that someone had taught to say ‘piss off’, a phrase he
later disgraced himself by using in front of Princess Margaret when I invited
her for lunch. But no sooner had Roger arrived and told everyone present to
piss off than I took his advice: there were always recording sessions to do,
tours to go on.

I still loved playing live, but I was physically spent. I’d started having
seizures, almost like epileptic fits; not often, but often enough to scare me.
I’d had a brain scan, but the neurologist I saw couldn’t find anything wrong
with me, although I’m sure if I’d told him what was going up my nose on a
regular basis, he could have made an accurate diagnosis on the spot. Bernie
didn’t look in much better shape than me. Since his divorce, the only time

you saw him without a beer in his hand was when he put it down to do a line
of coke. I started suggesting to him that he try writing with other people as
well as me — not that there was anything wrong with our relationship, either
professionally or personally, but maybe a change of scenery would do us both
good.

Everything came to a head on the penultimate night of the Madison
Square Garden residency. Backstage, I told the band that I couldn’t do it
anymore. They could have another year’s wages as severance pay, but there
would be no more tours for the foreseeable future. Towards the end of the
show, I mumbled something non-committal about going away for a while.
The minute I said it, I couldn’t work out whether I really meant it or not. On
the one hand, I clearly couldn’t carry on like this, schlepping around the
world. I’d convinced myself it was the root of all my problems. It was why I
was so knackered, it was why my relationships never worked out, it was why
I was unhappy. On the other, I still loved playing live. And I had been on the
road since I was eighteen. It was my job. I didn’t really know adult life
without it. What was I going to do all day? Watch Derf put shelves up and
listen to a mynah bird telling me to piss off every ten minutes?

So I was in a thoughtful mood when the journalist from Rolling Stone
arrived at my hotel. He was called Cliff Jahr and he’d been pestering for an
interview for weeks. I had no idea that Cliff was an out-and-proud gay man
who’d turned up determined to find out the truth about my sexuality. I don’t
think he saw it as a political thing — outing people wasn’t really viewed as
striking a blow against a repressive society back then. I think he was just a
hungry freelancer after a scoop.

I later learned that Cliff had an elaborate plan to wheedle the information
out of me. It involved a secret code word that he was going to drop into the
conversation as a signal for the photographer to leave the room, at which
point he would deploy his journalist’s guile to get me to confess my darkest
secret to him. Bless him, he didn’t get the chance to put his meticulous plan
into action. I brought the subject up before he did. He asked me if I was in
love with anyone, which was very much the wrong question to ask me in
those days, unless you had a few hours to spare and a burning desire to fill
them listening to me moaning about the terrible state of my personal life. I

started telling him how desperate I was to find someone to love. I
despairingly wondered aloud if relationships with women might not be
longer-lasting than the relationships I’d had with men. He looked a little
taken aback and — to his immense credit — asked if I wanted him to turn his
tape recorder off and speak off the record. I said no. Fuck it. It honestly
didn’t seem like that big an issue. Everyone around me had accepted I was
gay years before. Everyone in the music business knew about my relationship
with John Reid. And it really can’t have been that much of a shock for Cliff
Jahr, given that I’d previously told him the story of Divine and me being
turned away from Crisco Disco. Let’s look at the circumstantial evidence: I’d
been trying to get into a gay club, named after a famous anal lubricant, with
the world’s most famous drag queen. The news that I wasn’t heterosexual
could hardly have come as a bolt from the blue.

He asked me if I was bisexual and I said yes. You can see that as fudging
the issue if you want, but in fairness I’d had a relationship with a woman
before, and I had a relationship with a woman afterwards. He asked if Bernie
and I were ever a couple and I told him we weren’t. John Reid’s name came
up and I fibbed and said I’d never had a serious affair with anyone. It
certainly wasn’t my business to start outing anyone in Rolling Stone. I told
him I thought everyone should be able to go to bed with whoever they
wanted. ‘But they should draw the line at goats,’ I added.

At that moment, John Reid suddenly stuck his head round the door and
asked if everything was all right. I don’t know whether it was just perfect
timing, or whether he’d been listening at the door in a state of mounting panic
and finally, when I started making jokes about bestiality, couldn’t stand it any
longer. Perhaps he drew the line at goats, too. I told John everything was fine.
And I meant it. I didn’t feel relieved, or nervous, or proud, or any of the
things you might expect to feel when you publicly come out. I didn’t feel
anything really. I’d done all the fretting I had to do about my sexuality and
what people might think about it years ago. I didn’t care.

This was not an attitude that was shared by those around me. Not that
anyone said anything directly to me. Respectful of the amount of money I
was earning everyone, and wary of encouraging our old friend the Dwight
Family Temper to put in one of its show-stopping guest appearances, they

wouldn’t have dared. But around the time the feature came out, I got the
feeling that John Reid and my American record company were in a state of
anxiety, waiting to see what disastrous impact its revelations were going to
have on my career.

Eventually, the dust settled and the full, staggering extent of the damage I
had caused became clear. There wasn’t any. A couple of nutcases wrote into
Rolling Stone and said they were praying that my perverted soul be spared
God’s wrath and eternal damnation. A few radio stations in the US
announced they weren’t going to play my records anymore, but that didn’t
bother me in the slightest: at the risk of sounding arrogant, I strongly
suspected my career would limp on somehow without their help. People have
said the Rolling Stone piece caused a dip in my record sales in the States, but
my album sales had started to dip long before then. Rock of the Westies may
have got to Number One, but it had sold far less than Captain Fantastic.

In Britain, meanwhile, the Sun cancelled a competition to win copies of
Blue Moves, on the grounds that its cover — a beautiful Patrick Procktor
painting I owned of people sitting in a park — didn’t feature any women, and
thus, presumably, constituted terrifying homosexual propaganda from which
the public must be protected. Their logic seemed to be that if a Sun reader
Saw a painting of some men sitting in a park, they might immediately rip off
their wedding ring, abandon their wife and children and race to the nearest
gay bar singing ‘I Am What I Am’ as they went. But that was about it as far
as adverse reactions went.

Se OR

Actually, the British press seemed less interested in what was happening in
my sex life than what was happening on top of my head. In one sense, I
couldn’t blame them: I’d been pretty gripped by what was going on up there
myself for the last year or so. My hair had started thinning a little in the early
seventies, but a bad dye job in New York had suddenly caused the stuff to
stage a mass walkout. Impressed by the way the fashion designer Zandra
Rhodes seemed to change her hair colour to match her outfits, I had been
getting mine dyed every shade imaginable at a salon in London for years with
no apparent ill-effects. I’ve no idea what the New York hairdresser had put

on it but, not long afterwards, it started coming out in chunks. By the time of
the 1976 tour, there was virtually nothing left on top.

I hated how I looked. Some people are blessed with the kind of face that
looks good with a bald head. I am not one of those people. Without hair, I
bear a disturbing resemblance to the cartoon character Shrek. But salvation
was apparently at hand. I was directed to a man called Pierre Putot in Paris,
who was supposedly a great pioneer in the art of hair transplants. At that
point in history, hair transplants were so new that any doctor who could be
bothered to do them counted as a great pioneer, but I was assured he was the
best. Undergo a simple procedure, I was told, and I would leave his Paris
clinic a changed man, to cries of incroyable! and sacre bleu! from onlookers
dazzled by my new, leonine coiffure.

It didn’t quite work out like that. For one thing, it wasn’t a simple
procedure at all. It went on for five hours. I had it done twice, and both times
it hurt like hell. The technique they used had the unappetizing name of ‘strip
harvesting’: they took strips of hair from the back of my head with a scalpel
and attached them to the crown. The sound of the hair being removed was
disconcertingly like a rabbit gnawing its way through a carrot. I left the clinic
after the first procedure reeling in agony, lost my footing as I tried to get into
the back of a waiting car and hit the top of my head on the door frame. It was
at that moment I discovered that however much a hair transplant hurt, it was a
mere pinprick compared to the sensation of hitting your head on a car door
immediately after having a hair transplant. Frantically dabbing my now-
bleeding scalp with a tissue, I did the one thing I could think of that might
take my mind off the pain I was in. I told the driver to take me shopping.

To make matters worse, the hair transplant just didn’t work. I’m not sure
why, but it didn’t take. It wasn’t the doctor’s fault. Perhaps it had something
to do with the amount of drugs I was taking. Perhaps it had something to do
with the fact that the one thing they told me I must not do in the weeks after
the procedure was wear a hat, advice I chose to completely ignore on the
grounds that, without a hat, I now looked like something that turns up
towards the end of a horror film and starts strip-harvesting teenage campers
with an axe. My head was covered in scabs and weird craters. I suppose I
could have split the difference and worn something lighter than a hat, like a

bandana, but appearing in public dressed as a gypsy fortune teller seemed a
look too far, even for me.

When news of recent events at Monsieur Putot’s clinic reached the press,
they went crazy. Nothing I’d done in my career to date seemed to fascinate
them in quite the way that having a hair transplant did. The paparazzi became
obsessed with getting a photo of me without a hat on. You would have
thought I was hiding the secret of eternal life and happiness under there rather
than a bit of thinning hair. The paparazzi were out of luck — I kept a hat on in
public more or less permanently for the next decade or so. In the late eighties,
just before I got sober, I decided I’d had enough, dyed what was left of my
hair platinum blond, and appeared that way on the cover of my album
Sleeping with the Past. After I got sober, I had a weave done, where they take
what’s left of your hair and attach more hair to it. I debuted my new look at
the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert. A writer noted that I looked like I hada
dead squirrel on my head. He was mean, but, I was forced to concede, he also
had a point.

Eventually I gave up and got a hairpiece, made by the same people who
make wigs for Hollywood movies. It’s the strangest thing. People were
absolutely obsessed with my hair, or lack of it, for years. Then I started
wearing a wig and virtually no one’s mentioned it since. That said, a wig is
not without drawbacks of its own. A few years back, I was sleeping at my
home in Atlanta, when I woke up to the sound of voices in the apartment. I
was convinced we were being burgled. I pulled on my dressing gown and
started creeping out to see what was happening. I was halfway down the
corridor when I realized I didn’t have my hairpiece on. I rushed back to the
bedroom, reasoning that if I was going to be bludgeoned to death by
intruders, at least I wouldn’t be bald when it happened. Wig on, I went into
the kitchen to find two workmen, who had been sent up to fix a leak. They
apologized profusely for waking me up, but despite my relief, I couldn’t help
noticing they were staring at me. Perhaps they were starstruck, I thought, as I
headed back to bed. Stopping off in the bathroom, I realized that the
workmen weren’t bedazzled by the sight of the legendary Elton John
appearing before them. They were bedazzled by the sight of the legendary
Elton John appearing before them with his wig on back to front. I looked

completely ridiculous, like Frankie Howerd after a heavy night in a strong
wind. I took the thing off and went back to sleep.

Oe ON

If the world at large seemed to take the news about my sexuality very well, I
did start to wonder if I could perhaps have timed the announcement a little
better. One piece of advice I would give anyone planning on publicly coming
out is this. Try and make sure you don’t do it immediately after being
appointed chairman of a British football club, unless you want to spend your
Saturday afternoons listening to thousands of away supporters singing — to
the tune of ‘My Old Man Said Follow The Van’ — ‘Don’t sit down when
Elton’s around, or you’|l get a penis up your arse’. I suppose I should deliver
a lecture here decrying the homophobia of football fans in the mid-seventies,
but I have to be honest: I thought it was funny. Mortifying, but funny. I didn’t
feel threatened or frightened by it, it was obviously good-humoured, you had
to take it on the chin. They’d sing it and I’d just smile and wave at them.

In fact, when it came to Watford FC, I had far bigger problems to deal
with than whatever the opposition supporters were singing. It was a Watford-
supporting journalist who came to interview me back in 1974 who first
mentioned that the club was in trouble, and not just on the pitch. I still
followed them avidly, still went and watched them whenever I could, still
stood on The Bend, the same place on the terrace at Vicarage Road where I’d
stood with my dad as a kid. Standing there wasn’t the only thing about
watching them that brought back childhood memories. Watford were still just
as hopeless a team as they had been in the fifties, permanently stuck at the
bottom of the football league. Supporting them sometimes made me think of
being a member of Bluesology: I loved them to bits, but I knew we were
going absolutely nowhere.

Thanks to the journalist, I now learned that the club was in financial
trouble, too. They had no money, because no one was interested in coming to
watch them lose every week. They were desperately looking for ways to
make some. I rang them up and suggested I could play a benefit gig at the
ground. They agreed, and in return, offered me the chance to buy shares in
the club and become vice-chairman. For the gig, I dressed up in a bee outfit —

the closest thing I could find to the club’s mascot, a cartoon hornet called
Harry — and brought Rod Stewart along to perform with me. If nothing else,
this provided Rod with an afternoon of unceasing hilarity at the awfulness of
Watford’s ground — which admittedly was a crumbling dump, still with a
greyhound track running around the pitch — the abysmal nature of the team’s
results in contrast to his beloved Celtic and, especially, my new role as vice-
chairman.

“What the fuck do you know about football, Sharon?’ he asked. ‘If you
knew anything, you wouldn’t support this lot.’

I told him to fuck off. The rest of the board couldn’t have been more
welcoming. If they were bothered about having the only vice-chairman in the
football league who turned up to meetings with green and orange hair,
towering over everyone else because of his platform soles, they never
mentioned it. But my presence didn’t seem to be making much difference to
Watford itself: the team was still hopeless, and the club was still broke. A
thought kept playing on my mind. If supporting Watford was as frustrating as
being in Bluesology, then maybe, as in Bluesology, it was down to me to do
something about it.

So when the chairman, a local businessman called Jim Bonser, offered to
sell me the club outright in the spring of 1976, I said yes. John Reid was
furious, going on and on about what a drain on my finances owning a football
club was going to be. I told him to fuck off, too. I really wanted to do this.
I’ve always had a competitive streak, whether it was squash or table tennis or
Monopoly. Even today, if I play tennis, I don’t want to just knock a ball
about and get some exercise. I want to play a game, and I want to win. So
taking on the chairman’s job appealed to that aspect of my character. I liked
the challenge. What’s more, I was sick of having my weekends ruined
because Watford had lost.

And I loved the club. Supporting Watford was something that ran through
my whole life, while everything else had changed beyond recognition.
Vicarage Road was five or six miles from where I was born. It connected me
to my roots, reminded me that no matter how successful I was, or how
famous, or how much money I made, I was still a working-class boy from a
council house in Pinner.

But there was something else, too. I loved being around the club, because
everything about it was different from the music world I usually inhabited.
There was no glamour, no luxury, no limousines, no Starship. You got on the
train to Grimsby with the players, you watched the game, listened to the
opposition supporters sing about your allegedly insatiable desire to stick your
penis up the arse of anyone nearby, and then you got the train home, carrying
a box of local fish the Grimsby directors had presented you with as a gift at
the end of the match.

There was no bullshit. Once you reach a certain level of success in the
music business, you realize that a lot of people around you have started
telling you what they think you want to hear, rather than what they actually
think. No one wants to upset you, no one wants to rock the boat. But at
Watford, it wasn’t like that. The staff and players were friendly, they were
respectful, but they weren’t interested in massaging my ego. They would
happily tell me if they didn’t think much of my new album — ‘Why don’t you
do a song like “Daniel” again? I liked that one’ — or if they thought the coat I
was wearing looked ridiculous. That I wasn’t getting any kid glove treatment
because I was Elton John was brought home quite forcefully whenever I
elected to join in a five-a-side game with them. I’d get the ball, see a Watford
player on the opposite team coming in to tackle me and the next thing I knew,
they’d have possession and I’d be flying through the air at high speed,
backwards, as a prelude to landing flat on my arse.

And there was no bad behaviour, no diva tantrums from me. I had to learn
to be a good loser, to shake the hands of the opposition’s directors when they
beat us. I couldn’t lose my temper, or sulk, nor could I get drunk or take
drugs, because I wasn’t there as a huge star whose every whim had to be
catered for, I was there as a representative of Watford Football Club. I broke
the rules once. I turned up at a Boxing Day game hungover after a mammoth
coke bender and started helping myself to the boardroom Scotch. The
following day, I was given a real dressing down, the kind of telling-off no
one ordinarily had the balls to deliver to me.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You’re letting yourself down
and you’re letting the club down.’

The man delivering the talking-to was Graham Taylor, the new manager

I’d personally convinced to join Watford in April 1977. He was thirty-two
years old when I met him — young for a football manager — and he reminded
me of Bermie. Like Bernie, he came from Lincolnshire. Like Bernie, he took a
chance on me. Graham was paid very well for a manager of a team as lowly
as Watford, but taking the job was definitely a step down for him. He had
already taken his last team, Lincoln City, out of the fourth division and was
supposed to move on to somewhere much bigger, not go back to the bottom.
But, like Bernie, I clicked with him immediately, and like Bernie, I didn’t
interfere with what he did, I just let him get on with doing his job.

And, like Bernie, when things took off for us, they took off in a way
beyond anything we could have imagined. Graham was an incredible
manager. He assembled a fantastic back-room team around him. Bertie Mee
came from Arsenal to be his assistant, a veteran who’d been a player in the
thirties and knew the game inside out. Eddie Plumley arrived from Coventry
as chief executive. Graham bought new players and encouraged amazing
young talent. He signed John Barnes, aged sixteen: one of the greatest players
England’s ever seen, and Graham got him for the price of a new football kit.
He turmed club apprentices like Luther Blissett and Nigel Callaghan into star
players. He made them all train harder than they’d ever trained before, and he
got them to play exciting football — two big centre-forwards, two fast
wingers, a great attack, lots of goals, which meant that people wanted to
come and watch us. He got rid of the greyhound track and built new stands
and a family enclosure, a place specifically designed for parents to bring their
kids to watch the game in safety. Every team has one now, but Watford were
the first.

All of this cost money, which meant more moaning from John Reid. I
didn’t care. I wasn’t a businessman, pouring cash into the club as a financial
investment. Watford were in my blood. I was obsessed to the point that I
became superstitious — if we were on a winning streak, I wouldn’t change my
clothes or empty my pockets — and so insanely enthusiastic, I could literally
talk people into becoming Watford fans. I converted my old friend Muff
Winwood from a West Brom supporter to a member of the Watford board. I
went to local council meetings and tried in vain to convince them to let us
build a new stadium on the outskirts of the town. After matches, I’d go to the

Supporters’ Club, a little building up on the main stand, meet with Watford
fans and listen to what they had to say. I wanted them to know that I really
cared about the club, that we weren’t taking them for granted, that without
the supporters Watford was nothing. I threw huge parties for the players and
staff and their families at Woodside, with five-a-side games and egg and
spoon races. I bought an Aston Martin, had it painted in Watford’s colours —
yellow, with a red and black stripe down the middle — and drove to away
games in it; I called it the Chairman’s Car. I didn’t realize how much
attention it had attracted until I was introduced to Prince Philip. We were
making polite conversation, when he suddenly changed the subject.

“You live near Windsor Castle, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen the
bloody idiot who drives around that area in his ghastly car? It’s bright yellow
with a ridiculous stripe on it. Do you know him?’

“Yes, Your Highness. It’s actually me.’

‘Really?’ He didn’t appear particularly taken aback by this news at all. In
fact, he seemed quite pleased to have found the idiot in question, so that he
could give him the benefit of his advice. ‘What the hell are you thinking?
Ridiculous. Makes you look like a bloody fool. Get rid of it.’

If the Chairman’s Car couldn’t get me to the game on time, I’d charter a
helicopter. If I couldn’t make it because I was abroad, I would phone the club
and they would plug my call into the local hospital radio broadcast of the
match: backstage somewhere in America, the band would listen to me in my
dressing room, alone, screaming my head off because we’d beaten
Southampton in a cup tie. If it was the middle of the night in New Zealand,
I’d get up to listen. If it clashed with the start of a gig, I’d delay the start of
the gig. I loved it: the excitement of the games, the feeling of camaraderie, of
being part of a team where it felt like everyone was working towards the
same end, from the players to the tea ladies. I couldn’t have bought the
personal happiness that Watford brought me at any price.

Besides, I wasn’t throwing money into a bottomless pit. I could see the
results of my spending. Watford started winning and kept winning. After one
season, we were into the Third Division. After two, we were in the Second.
In 1981, Watford were promoted to the First Division for the first time in
their history. The next year we were runners-up, the second most successful

football team in Britain. It meant we would be playing in the UEFA Cup,
against the biggest teams in Europe: Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Inter
Milan. That was what I’d told Graham I’d wanted the club to achieve at our
first meeting. He had looked at me like I was out of my mind and started
telling me how we’d be lucky to stay in the Fourth Division with the team we
had — ‘you’ve got a fucking giraffe for a centre-forward’ — before realizing I
was deadly serious and prepared to put my money where my mouth was. We
decided it would probably take ten years. Watford had done it in five.

And then, in 1984, we made the FA Cup Final. It’s the oldest and most
prestigious football competition in Britain: Wembley stadium, 100,000 fans. I
was used to Watford doing well by now — it’s funny how easily you become
accustomed to success after decades of failure — but just before the match
started, it suddenly hit me how far we had come, from a hopeless little club
that no one went to watch, that people laughed at, to this. The brass band
struck up with ‘Abide With Me’, the traditional FA Cup hymn, and that was
it: I burst into tears in full view of the BBC’s cameras. As it turned out, that
was the highlight of the day. We were beaten 2—0 by Everton. It should have
been a much closer game — one of their goals should have been disallowed —
but ultimately they played better than we did. I was distraught, but we still
threw a party for the team: it was a fantastic achievement.

Looking out at the crowd at Wembley before the game began, I’d felt like
I had onstage at Dodger Stadium. And, like the Dodger Stadium gigs, I think
I knew that this was a sort of pinnacle, that it didn’t get any better than this. I
was right. A couple of years later, Graham left to become manager at Aston
Villa. I appointed a manager called Dave Bassett as his replacement, but it
didn’t work out; the chemistry wasn’t right, he didn’t gel with the team. I
started thinking that I should have left Watford when Graham did. I still
loved the club, but there had been a serendipity, a magic, about the two of us
together, and I couldn’t conjure up that same magic without him.

Eventually I sold Watford to Jack Petchey, a multimillionaire who’d
made his money in cars. Seven years later, I bought back a load of shares in
the club and became chairman again — a businessman rather than someone
who put his heart into the club, I felt Jack was making a terrible mess of
things, and Watford had slipped back into the Second Division. I only did it

because Graham agreed to come back as manager. The team did well, but it
wasn’t the same as the first time around; there wasn’t that incredible
challenge of rising from the bottom. Finally, Graham left again, and this time,
so did I. I resigned as chairman for good in 2002. In a weird way, our
partnership quietly continued. Right up until he died in 2017, I still rang
Graham all the time to talk about the team: how they were playing, what we
thought of the latest manager. Whatever else Graham Taylor achieved in
football, nothing took his heart away from Watford.

I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved together, but I owe Watford far
more than Watford owe me. I was chairman throughout the worst period of
my life: years of addiction and unhappiness, failed relationships, bad business
deals, court cases, unending turmoil. Through all of that, Watford were a
constant source of happiness to me. When I didn’t feel I had any love in my
personal life, I knew I had love from the club and the supporters. It gave me
something else to concentrate on, a passion that could take my mind away
from everything that was going wrong. For obvious reasons, there are chunks
of the eighties I have no recollection of — I struggled to remember what had
happened the next day, let alone thirty years later — but every Watford game I
saw is permanently etched on my memory. The night we knocked
Manchester United out of the League Cup at Old Trafford, when we were still
a Third Division side: two goals by Blissett, both headers, the newspapers
that never normally bothered writing about Watford calling them Elton
John’s Rocket Men the next morning. The night in November 1982 when we
were away to Nottingham Forest in the Milk Cup. They beat us 7—3, but I
thought it was one of the greatest games of football I’d ever seen in my life
and Forest’s legendary manager Brian Clough agreed with me, before turning
to Graham and telling him he would never allow his chairman to sit on the
bloody touchline the way I did. If I hadn’t had the football club then God
knows what would have happened to me. I’m not exaggerating when I say I
think Watford might have saved my life.

eight

Back at home in the autumn of 1976, and theoretically retired from live
performance, I set about getting Woodside renovated. There has been a house
on the same site in Old Windsor since the eleventh century — it was originally
built for William the Conqueror’s physician — but it kept burning down; the
latest version was built in 1947 for Michael Sobell, who made a fortune
manufacturing radios and televisions. It was built in a mock-Georgian style,
but when doing it up, I decided to eschew Regency or Palladian decoration in
favour of a style known among interior design specialists as Mid-70s Pop
Star On Drugs Goes Berserk. There were pinball machines, jukeboxes, brass
palm trees, memorabilia everywhere. There were Tiffany lamps next to the
pair of four-foot-high Doc Marten boots I’d worn while singing ‘Pinball
Wizard’ in The Who’s film Tommy. On the walls, Rembrandt etchings jostled
for space with gold discs and stuff fans had sent me. I had a five-a-side
football pitch installed in the grounds and a fully equipped disco built just off
the living room, complete with lights, mirrorball and DJ booth, and a pair of
enormous speakers. One room housed a replica of Tutankhamun’s state
throne. I had speakers rigged up outside the house, linked to the stereo in my
bedroom. When I woke up, I’d play a fanfare through the speakers, to let
everyone in the house know I was coming. I thought this was hilarious, a
camp joke, but for some reason, visitors who weren’t prepared for the fanfare
tended to react to it with a thoughtful expression, as if considering the
possibility that success might have gone to my head.

In the grounds there was an orangery that had been converted into a
separate flat with its own garden, which I moved my grandmother into. Her

second husband Horace had died and I didn’t like the thought of her living on
her own in her seventies. She spent the rest of her life there until she passed
away in 1995. I thought there was a beautiful circularity about that. I was
born in her house, she died in mine, although her life there was very self-
contained. She was always an independent woman, and I didn’t want to take
that away from her. She was behind the gates of Woodside, so I knew she
was Safe, but she lived her own life, had her own friends. I could drop in to
see her whenever I wanted, but I could also keep the madness of my life
away from her, protect her from all the excess and stupidity. And she seemed
really happy there, pottering around in the garden. She was weeding her
borders when the Queen Mother came to Woodside for lunch — we’d got on
well when I met her at Bryan Forbes’s house, and I’d been invited to the
Royal Lodge in Windsor for dinner. She was really good fun. After the meal,
she’d insisted that we dance to her favourite record, which turned out to be an
old Irish drinking song called ‘Slattery’s Mounted Fut’: I think Val Doonican
recorded a version of it.

So, having enjoyed the surreal experience of dancing with the Queen
Mum to an Irish drinking song, there seemed no harm in inviting her to
lunch. She told me she had been friends with the family who had lived at
Woodside before the war, and I thought she might want to see the house
again. When she accepted, I decided it would be hilarious not to tell my
grandmother in advance who was coming. I just called her over: ‘Come here,
Gran, there’s someone who wants to meet you.’ Unfortunately, my
grandmother didn’t see the funny side of it. All hell broke loose when the
Queen Mother left.

‘How could you do that to me? Standing there talking to the Queen Mum
in my bleedin’ wellies and gardening gloves! I’ve never been so embarrassed
in my life! Don’t ever do that to me again!’

I employed some staff to look after Woodside. A guy called Bob Halley
was my chauffeur at first, and his wife Pearl was the housekeeper: a lovely
woman, but, as it turned out, useless at cooking. There were a couple of
cleaners and a PA called Andy Hill. He was the son of the landlord of the
Northwood Hills, the pub where I’d played the piano as a kid, and I’d
employed him largely because I had a crush on him; when that wore off, I

realized he wasn’t right for the job. There was a lesson in there somewhere.
Eventually I gave Bob Halley the PA role.

I got my mum to come and manage the house, which turned out to be a
dreadful mistake. She was very good at the accounts, but she ruled the place
with a rod of iron. I’d noticed a change in the way she was behaving. She was
still happy with Derf, but somehow seemed to be slipping back into the way
she had been before she met him: moody and difficult and argumentative,
nothing ever good enough. I thought getting her to work with me might bring
us closer together again, like we had been in Frome Court when Bernie and I
were starting out. But no. It was as if the pleasure she had taken in my early
success had worn off. She seemed to hate everything I did. There was a
constant drizzle of pissy criticism from her — about what I wore, about my
friends, about the music I made. And there were a lot of arguments about
money. I suppose she’d lived through the war and rationing and had that
frugal, waste-not-want-not outlook ingrained in her. But, as I think we’ve
established quite thoroughly by now, that’s not really my attitude to
spending. I got sick of having my every purchase queried, having to have a
row with her every time I bought someone else a gift. It felt like there was no
escape from her, no privacy. You get up in the morning after you’ve slept
with someone, and the first person you and your latest conquest bump into is
your mum, angrily waving a receipt under your nose and demanding: ‘Why
have you spent this much on a dress for Kiki Dee?’ It’s just weird. It really
takes the shine off the atmosphere of post-coital bliss. Worse, she had a habit
of being absolutely foul to the rest of the staff at the house, treating them like
shit, like she was the lady of the manor and they were her servants. I was
always having to patch things up after she’d lost her temper and screamed at
someone. Eventually the situation just became too claustrophobic and tense.
She and Derf moved down to the south coast, which frankly came as a relief.

I was in bed alone at Woodside one Sunday morning, half watching
television, when a guy with bright orange hair suddenly appeared on the
screen and called Rod Stewart a useless old fucker. I hadn’t really been
paying attention, but now I was suddenly riveted: someone slagging Rod off
was Clearly too good to miss. His name was Johnny Rotten, he was wearing
the most amazing clothes and I thought he was hilarious — like a cross

between an angry young man and a bitchy old queen, really acidic and witty.
He was being interviewed about the burgeoning punk scene in London by a
woman Called Janet Street-Porter. I liked her, too; she was gobby and bold. In
absolute fairness to Rod, Johnny Rotten appeared to hate everything — I was
fairly certain he thought I too was a useless old fucker. Nevertheless, I made
a mental note to ring Rod later, just to make sure he knew all about it. ‘Hello,
Phyllis, did you see the TV this morning? This new band were on called the
Sex Pistols and, you’ll never believe this, they said you were a useless old
fucker. Those were their exact words: Rod Stewart is a useless old fucker.
Isn’t that terrible? You’re only thirty-two. How awful for you.’

I didn’t really care what they thought of me. I loved punk. I loved its
energy, attitude and style, and I loved that my old friend Marc Bolan
immediately claimed he’d invented it twenty years ago; that was just the most
Marc response imaginable. I didn’t feel shocked by punk — I’d lived through
the scandal and social upheaval that rock ‘n’ roll provoked in the fifties, so I
was Virtually immune to the idea of music causing outrage — and I didn’t feel
threatened or rendered obsolete by it either. I couldn’t really imagine Elton
John fans burning their copies of Captain Fantastic in order to go to the
Vortex and spit at The Lurkers. And even if they did, that was out of my
hands: it wasn’t a musical trend I was interested in chasing. But I thought The
Clash and Buzzcocks and Siouxsie And The Banshees were fantastic. I
thought Janet Street-Porter was fantastic too. The day after the show I got
hold of her on the phone and invited her to lunch, and that was that: we’ve
been lifelong friends ever since.

Even if punk didn’t affect me directly, it felt like a sign that things were
changing. Another sign that things were changing. There were a lot of them
around. I’d stopped working with Dick James and DJM. My contract with
them ran out just after Rock of the Westies was released. They were entitled
to put out a live album called Here and There, which I hated — it wasn’t that
the music on it was bad, but it was made up of old recordings from 1972 and
1974, and it seemed to exist only in order to make money. And that was it. I
declined to sign another contract with them and moved to my own label,
Rocket. John Reid was muttering darkly that Dick had been ripping us off for
years. He thought the contracts Bernie and I had signed with Dick in the

sixties were unfair; that the royalty rates we received were too low; that there
was something fishy about the way our foreign royalties were worked out. By
the time DJM, its administrators and foreign subsidiaries had taken their cut,
Bernie and I were only getting fifteen quid each from every £100 we earned.
It was just the standard music business practices of the day, but the standard
music business practices of the day were wrong. It all ended up in a court
case in the mid-eighties, which we won. I hated every minute of it, because I
loved Dick; I never had a bad word to say about him personally. And yet I
felt I had to: the industry had to change the way it treated artists. Dick had a
fatal heart attack not long afterwards, and his son Steve blamed me for his
death. It was really ugly, really sad. That wasn’t how the story of Dick and I
was supposed to end at all.

In addition to leaving DJM, Bernie and I had agreed to take a break from
working together. There was no huge row, no big falling-out. It just seemed
like the right thing to do. We had been tied to each other for ten years, and it
was good to stop before our partnership felt like a rut we were stuck in. I
didn’t want us to end up like Bacharach and David, who worked together
until they couldn’t stand the sight of each other. The only thing Bernie had
really done without me was make a solo album — he’d read some of his
poetry over a musical backing provided by Caleb Quaye and Davey
Johnstone. Dick James released it, then called a completely ludicrous meeting
at which he kept insisting I should use Bernie as a support act on a
forthcoming American tour: ‘He can read his poems! People will love it!’ I
couldn’t imagine why Dick thought this was a good idea, unless he’d secretly
taken out a life insurance policy on Bernie and was hoping to make a swift
financial return by getting him killed onstage. American rock audiences in the
early seventies were many things, but prepared to listen to a man read poems
about his Lincolnshire boyhood for forty-five minutes wasn’t one of them,
however wonderful said poems were. I pointed out that it was hard enough to
get Bernie to come onstage and take a bow at the end of a show, let alone
perform an experimental spoken-word support set, and the idea was
mercifully dropped.

Now, however, Bernie had really struck out on his own. He’d made an
album with Alice Cooper, a big concept work about Alice’s alcoholism and

recent stay in rehab. He got our old bass player Dee Murray involved, and
Davey Johnstone on guitar. It was a good album. I was impressed. So why
did I feel so odd when I looked at the songwriting credits and saw Alice
Cooper’s name next to Bermie’s instead of mine? Actually, there was nothing
odd about how I felt. It was very straightforward. I hated admitting it to
myself, but I felt jealous.

I put it out of my mind. After all, I had a new writing partner, Gary
Osborne, who I’d first met when he wrote the English lyrics for
‘Amoureuse’, the French song that had finally given Kiki Dee a hit. It was
the opposite of working with Bernie — Gary wanted me to write the music
before he started the lyrics — but we came up with some really good songs
together: ‘Blue Eyes’, ‘Little Jeannie’, a ballad called ‘Chloe’. And we
became very close friends. So close that it was Gary and his wife Jenny that I
called on Christmas Day in tears, when my then boyfriend mysteriously
failed to fly in from LA as arranged. A catastrophic choice of partner even by
my standards, this one had decided he wasn’t gay after all and had run off
with an air stewardess who worked on the Starship. Not that he told me any
of this. He just vanished. His plane arrived at Heathrow, he wasn’t on it, and I
literally never heard from him again. Perhaps I should have seen it coming
but, in fairness, he didn’t seem very straight when he was in bed with me. I
was in a terrible state, sitting at home alone with only a load of unopened
presents and an uncooked turkey for company: anticipating a quiet romantic
Christmas, I’d given everyone who worked at Woodside the week off. Gary
and Jenny changed their plans and drove down from London to stay with me.
They were a lovely couple.

And there were definitely other advantages to not working with Bernie. I
could experiment with music in ways I never had before. I flew to Seattle to
record a few songs for an EP with producer Thom Bell, the man who had
made the Philadelphia soul records that had inspired ‘Philadelphia Freedom’.
He made me sing lower than I previously had and wrapped the songs in
luxurious strings. Twenty-seven years later, one of the tracks we recorded,
‘Are You Ready For Love’, went to Number One in Britain, which tells you
something about how timeless Thom Bell’s sound is. After that I wrote some
great songs with the new wave singer Tom Robinson. One was called

‘Sartorial Eloquence’, a title that my US record company decided Americans
were too stupid to understand: they insisted on renaming it ‘Don’t Ya Wanna
Play This Game No More’, which really didn’t have the same poetic quality
to it. Another of Thom’s tracks, ‘Elton’s Song’, was very different from
anything Bernie would have done, a melancholy depiction of a gay schoolboy
with a crush on one of his friends. I wrote with Tim Rice, who had spent the
seventies breaking records and winning awards with Jesus Christ Superstar
and Evita, musicals he had written with Andrew Lloyd Webber. Only one
song we wrote was released at the time — ‘Legal Boys’, which came out in
1982 on my album Jump Up! — but decades later, it ended up being one of the
most important musical partnerships of my career.

And, just occasionally, I wrote completely alone for the first time. One
Sunday at Woodside, gloomy and hungover, I wrote an instrumental that
fitted my mood, and kept singing one line of lyrics over the top: ‘Life isn’t
everything’. The next morning I found out that a boy called Guy Burchett
who worked for Rocket had died in a motorbike crash at virtually the same
time I was writing the song, so I called it ‘Song For Guy’. It was like nothing
I’d ever done before, and my American record label refused to release it as a
single — I was furious — but it became a colossal hit in Europe. Years later,
when I first met Gianni Versace, he told me it was his favourite song of mine.
He kept saying how wonderfully brave he thought it was. I thought that was a
bit over-the-top; it was certainly different, but I wouldn’t have described it as
brave. After a while it became apparent that Gianni thought it was
wonderfully brave because he’d misheard the title and was under the
impression I’d called it ‘Song For A Gay’.

Some of my experiments, however, should probably have stayed in the
laboratory. Pop videos were still a new thing in early 1978, and I decided to
jump in feet first. Of course I did: I was going to make the most incredible,
expensive, lavish pop video of all time, for a song called ‘Ego’. We spent a
fortune on it, hiring the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. It was shot like a
movie. There were dozens of actors involved, stage sets, flaming torches,
murder scenes, flashbacks shot in sepia. Such was my commitment to the
project, I even agreed to take my hat off onscreen at one point. We hired a
West End cinema for a premiere, overlooking the fact that if people turn out

for a film premiere they expect the film to last longer than three and a half
minutes. As it ended, there was some hesitant applause and an unmistakable
air of ‘is that it?’ filled the room, as if I’d invited the audience to a black-tie
dinner and then given them a Twix. So I made them show the whole thing
twice, which succeeded in changing the atmosphere quite dramatically: ‘is
that it?’ was swiftly replaced by the equally unmistakable air of ‘not this
again’. Better yet, no one would show the bloody thing — this was years
before MTV started, and there weren’t really the outlets for a video on TV
shows — so the single flopped. If nothing else, this gave John Reid the
opportunity to go on one of his celebrated rampages through the office
personnel, firing people for their incompetence, then having to hire them
again shortly afterwards. I’ve hated making videos ever since.

And then there was the disco album, an idea I think was partly inspired by
the amount of time I was spending at Studio 54. I went there every time I
visited New York. It was astonishing, different from any club I’d been to
before. The guy who ran it, Steve Rubell, was blessed with the ability to
create an amazing environment, full of gorgeous waiters in tiny shorts and
other extraordinary characters. I don’t mean the celebrities, although there
were plenty of them. I mean people like Disco Sally, who looked about
seventy and always seemed to be having a whale of a time, and Rollereena, a
guy who dressed up like Miss Havisham from Great Expectations and went
around the dance floor on roller skates. More impressive still, Steve Rubell
could create this incredible environment while seemingly permanently out of
his mind on Quaaludes. You got the feeling that Studio 54 was a magical
space in which anything could happen and sometimes did. Rocket once threw
a party there, and at one point, I spotted Lou Reed and Lou’s transgender
lover Rachel locked in conversation with, of all people, Cliff Richard. While
it was nice to see people with what you might tactfully describe as having
differing outlooks on life getting along so famously, the mind did boggle a
little at what on earth they were actually talking about.

There was a basement downstairs where celebrities could go and snort
coke off a pinball machine. It was certainly an experience going down there —
one night I was interrupted by a visibly zonked Liza Minnelli, who wanted to
know if I would marry her — but the thing that really attracted me to the club

was the thing that no one ever mentions about Studio 54: the music. Well, the
music and the waiters, but the waiters were a dead loss. I’d try and chat them
up, but they didn’t get off work until 7 am. Of course, I’d happily hang
around until 7 a.m., but by that point, the evening’s excesses had usually
taken their toll on me and nothing would come of it. It’s hard to conjure up a
seductive mood when your eyeballs are pointing in different directions and it
takes you three attempts to successfully navigate your way through the exit.

So the lure really was the music. I loved disco as much as I had when I
first heard it in LA’s gay clubs. That was the whole reason I’d had a disco
built at Woodside: so I could DJ when people came to stay, impress them
with my extensive collection of 12-inch singles. But, I was forced to admit,
the DJs at Studio 54 had a better collection than me, and a sound system at
their disposal that made the speakers I’d had brought in specially from
Trident Studios in London sound like a transistor radio with its battery
running out. They could make anyone dance, even Rod Stewart, which was
quite a feat — for some reason, Rod used to carry on as if dancing was against
his religion. He always needed a little encouragement to actually get on the
floor, which is where the bottles of amy] nitrate I used to bring along came in
handy. Poppers had become a big thing in gay clubs in the seventies: you
sniffed it and it gave you a brief, legal, euphoric high. The brand I had was
called, I regret to inform you, Cum, and it seemed to have a particularly
transformative effect on Rod. I offered some to him, and suddenly — after
hours of refusing to budge from his seat — he was up and dancing for the rest
of the night. The only time he stopped was when he was after another sniff:
“Ere, you got any more of that Cum, Sharon?’

One of disco’s big producers was Pete Bellotte, who I’d known back in
the sixties: Bluesology had played alongside his band The Sinners at the Top
Ten Club in Hamburg. It was good to see him again, and the album we made
might have worked, had I not decided that I wasn’t going to write any songs
for it — I’d just sing whatever Pete and his staff writers came up with. I
suspect the thinking behind this idea was influenced by the fact that I only
owed my American label, Uni, a couple more albums. I was still furious
about them refusing to release ‘Song For Guy’ and had decided that I wanted
to get out of my contract as quickly as possible, with the minimum of effort.

Not everything on Victim of Love was terrible — if the title track had come on
at Studio 54, I’d have danced to it — but making an album in bad faith like
that is never a good idea. No matter what you do, it somehow gets into the
music: you can just tell it’s not coming from an honest place. Furthermore, it
was released at the end of 1979, just as a huge backlash against disco started
in the States, with particular venom reserved for rock artists who had dared to
dabble in the genre. Victim of Love sank like a stone on both sides of the
Atlantic. Once more, the offices of Rocket rang to the screams of John Reid
firing everybody, then sheepishly having to hire them again.

a. a |

As I suspected the moment I’d announced it onstage at Madison Square
Garden, retiring from live performance wasn’t a plan I could stick to. Or at
least, sometimes I couldn’t. I was unable to decide whether it was the
smartest move I’d ever made, or the stupidest. My opinion changed all the
time, depending on my mood, with predictably demented results. One day, I
would be perfectly happy at home, telling anyone who’d listen about how
wonderful it was not being shackled to the old cycle of touring, delighting in
the free time that allowed me to concentrate on being chairman of Watford
FC. The next, I’d be on the phone to Stiff Records, a small independent label
that was home to Ian Dury and Elvis Costello, offering my services as a
keyboard player on their upcoming package tour, which they accepted. My
sudden urge to get in front of an audience again was bolstered by the fact that
I had a crush on one of their artists, Wreckless Eric — sadly, he was nowhere
near wreckless enough to get involved with me.

Then I assembled a fresh set of backing musicians, based around China,
the band Davey Johnstone had formed when I said I wouldn’t tour anymore.
We spent three weeks frantically rehearsing for a fundraising concert at
Wembley that I had committed to because I was involved with the charity
behind it, Goaldiggers. During the rehearsals, I started making vague noises
about going back on the road with them. Then I decided on the night that the
whole idea was a terrible mistake and announced my retirement onstage
again, this time without telling anyone first. John Reid was furious. The full
and frank discussion between us that took place backstage after the gig could

apparently be heard not just throughout Wembley but most of north London.

Eventually, I realized that if I was going to play live again, it had to be
different, a challenge. I decided to tour with Ray Cooper, who I’d known
since before I was famous. He’d played in a band called Blue Mink, who
were part of the scene around DJM -— their singer Roger Cook was also a
songwriter signed to Dick James’s publishing company, and virtually every
member of Blue Mink had ended up helping out on my early albums. Ray
had been the percussionist in my band on and off for years; but these shows
would be just me and him, playing theatres rather than stadiums. We had
done a few shows like that before, a couple of charity concerts at the
Rainbow in London, the first of which had been enlivened by the presence of
the Queen’s cousin, Princess Alexandra. She had sat politely through the
performance, then come backstage, and got the conversation off to a flying
start by smiling sweetly and asking, ‘How do you have so much energy
onstage? Do you take a lot of cocaine?’

It was one of those moments where time appears to stand still while your
brain tries to work out what the hell’s going on. Was she incredibly naive,
and didn’t really understand what she’d just said? Or, worse, did she realize
exactly what she’d just said? Jesus, did she know? Had news of my
gargantuan appetite for coke — already quite the hot topic around the music
business — actually reached Buckingham Palace? Were they all discussing it
over dinner? ‘I hear you had lunch at Elton John’s house and met his nan,
Mother — have you heard he’s an absolute fiend for the old blow?’ I managed
to collect myself enough to mumble a shaky denial.

Still, the Rainbow shows had been really exhilarating, unexpected
enquiries from members of the Royal Family about my drug _ habits
notwithstanding. They were terrifying in the best possible way — if it’s only
you and a percussionist onstage, you can’t switch off for a moment and let
the band take the strain. You have to concentrate every second, and your
playing has to be razor-sharp. And when we went on tour, it really worked.
The gigs got fabulous reviews and, every night, I felt that perfect cocktail of
apprehension and excitement, exactly how a performer should feel before
they go onstage. It was freeing and challenging and fulfilling, because it was
completely different from anything I’d done before: the songs we performed,

the way it was presented, even the places we played. I was keen to go to
countries I hadn’t previously visited, even if I wasn’t that well known there:
Spain, Switzerland, Ireland, Israel. And that’s how I ended up flying out of
Heathrow, flat on my back with my legs in the air, heading for Moscow.

I was flat on my back with my legs in the air because we were flying
Aeroflot, and the moment we took off, it became apparent that the Russian
State airline didn’t stretch to actually bolting the seats to the floor of the
plane. Nor, I couldn’t help noticing, did there seem to be any oxygen masks
in case of an emergency. What the plane did have in abundance was a very
distinctive smell: antiseptic and sharp, it reminded me a bit of the carbolic
soap my grandma used to wash me with when I was a kid. I never found out
exactly what it was, but it was the smell of Russia in 1979 — every hotel had
it too.

I’d suggested playing in Russia to the promoter Harvey Goldsmith almost
as a joke. I never thought it would happen. Western rock music was more or
less forbidden under communism — tapes of albums got passed around like
contraband goods — and homosexuality was illegal, so the chances of them
agreeing to be entertained by an openly gay rock star seemed almost non-
existent. But Moscow was scheduled to host the Olympic Games in 1980,
and I think they were looking for some positive advance publicity. They
didn’t want the Soviet Union to be seen as a monolithic, grey state where fun
was banned. Harvey made a request via the Foreign Office and the Russians
sent an official from the state music promoter to see a gig Ray and I played in
Oxford. Having established that we weren’t the Sex Pistols, and deeming us
no great threat to the morals of communist youth, they gave the green light to
the tour. I took my mum and Derf, a handful of British and American
journalists and a film crew, fronted by the writers Dick Clement and Ian La
Frenais, to make a documentary. It felt hugely exciting, a genuine journey
into the unknown, albeit one that could end at any moment with death by
suffocation if the plane lost pressure.

We were met at Moscow Airport by a group of dignitaries, two girls who
were going to act as our translators and an ex-army guy called Sasha. I was
told he was going to be my bodyguard. Everyone else in our party
automatically assumed he was spying on us for the KGB. I decided he could

spy on me to his heart’s content — he was extremely good-looking, if
disappointingly keen on telling me about his wife and children. We boarded a
sleeper train bound for Leningrad. It was hot — I’d dressed for winter in the
Siberian steppes, only to find Moscow in the grip of a sweltering heatwave —
and it was uncomfortable, but that wasn’t the Russians’ fault. It was down to
the fact that, through the thin wall, I could very clearly hear John Reid, in the
next sleeper cabin, apparently doing his persistent best to seduce a reporter
from the Daily Mail.

The hotel in Leningrad didn’t look terribly promising. The food was
indescribable: fifty-seven varieties of beetroot soup and potatoes. If this was
what they were serving in the best hotels, what the hell were ordinary people
eating? Every floor was guarded by a stern-faced old woman, a proper
Russian babushka, on the lookout for any kind of Western impropriety. But it
turned out to be quite the swinging spot. The first morning we were there, the
road crew turned up for breakfast looking dazed and delighted. They had
learned that being from the West and having any connection to rock and roll,
even carrying the speakers, made you sexually irresistible to the
chambermaids. They would turn up in the room, start running a bath in order
to distract the ears of the ever-vigilant babushkas, then take all their clothes
off and jump on you. The hotel bar seemed to be a non-stop party, filled with
people who’d travelled from Finland with the specific intention of getting as
pissed as possible on cheap Russian vodka. The stuff was lethal. At one
point, someone sidled up to me and, to my disbelief, handed me a joint. Here,
in the middle of repressive, communist Russia, the road crew had somehow
managed to source some pot. They seemed to be having all the luck. Perhaps
it was rubbing off — not long afterwards, Sasha showed up and suggested we
go up to my room. I was so taken aback, I brought up the subject of his wife
and children unprompted. No, he said, it was fine: ‘In the army, all the men
have sex with each other, because we don’t see our wives.’ So I ended the
evening drunk, stoned and having sex with a soldier. I don’t know exactly
what I’d been expecting from my first forty-eight hours in Russia, but this
definitely wasn’t it.

I still would have fallen in love with Russia even if one of its citizens
hadn’t taken me to bed. The people were impossibly kind and generous.

Weirdly, they reminded me of Americans: they had that same sense of instant
warmth and hospitality. We were shown the Hermitage and the Summer
Palace; Peter the Great’s log cabin and the Kremlin. We saw collections of
Impressionist art and Fabergé eggs extraordinary enough to take your mind
off what you’d be having for lunch. Everywhere we went, people tried to give
us presents: bars of chocolate, soft toys, things that they must have had to
save up to buy. They would press them into your hands in the street or push
them through the windows of your train as it pulled out of the station. It made
my mum cry: ‘These people have got absolutely nothing, and they’re giving
things to you.’

The gigs were in Leningrad and Moscow, and they turned out to be
fantastic. I say turned out, because they always started badly. All the best
seats were given to high-ranking Communist Party officials, to ensure that
the reaction was nothing more exciting than polite applause. The people who
actually wanted to see me were crammed at the back. But they had reckoned
without Ray Cooper. Ray is a fabulous musician, who plays the most
inconspicuous instruments in the most conspicuous way imaginable. He’s
like the Jimi Hendrix of the tambourine, a born frontman trapped in a
percussionist’s body. And in Russia, he played as if every other wildly
flamboyant performance he’d given over the years was merely a warm-up.
He would goad the audience into clapping along, or run to the front of the
stage and scream at them to get on their feet. It worked. The kids at the back
ran down the aisles to the front. They threw flowers and asked for autographs
in between songs. I’d been told not to sing ‘Back In The USSR’, so of course
I did. If the KGB had been spying on me, they clearly hadn’t been spying
closely enough to learn that one of the quickest ways to get me to do
something is to tell me not to do it.

After the Moscow show, there were thousands of people crowded around
the venue, chanting my name — far more than could possibly have been at the
show. From the window of the dressing room, I threw the flowers I’d been
given back to them. My mum looked on. ‘You’d be better off throwing them
a tomato,’ she said, the memory of our most recent feast of beetroot soup and
potatoes still fresh in her mind. “They’ve probably never bleedin’ seen one.’

As a PR exercise for the Soviet Union, my visit was a waste of time. Six

months later, they invaded Afghanistan, and whatever international goodwill
they’d built up by letting me sing ‘Bennie And The Jets’ didn’t count for
much after that. But for me, it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with
Russia and with Russians. I’ve never stopped going back there, even when
people have said I shouldn’t. If anything, things are worse for gay Russians
under Vladimir Putin than they were in 1979, but what would I achieve by
boycotting the place? I’m in a very privileged position in Russia. I’ve always
been accepted and welcomed, despite the fact they know I’m gay, so I’m not
afraid to speak out while I’m there. I can make statements that get reported; I
can meet with gay people and people from the Health Ministry and promote
the work that the Elton John AIDS Foundation does over there. I never saw
Sasha again, but I later learned he was one of the first people to die of AIDS
in Russia. Today it has one of the fastest-growing HIV/AIDS epidemics in
the world. That isn’t going to change without negotiation, without sitting
down and talking. And the debate has to start somewhere. So I keep going
back, and every time I do, I say something onstage about homophobia or gay
rights. Sometimes a few people walk out, but the vast majority applaud. I
owe it to the Russian people to keep doing that. I owe it to myself.

wee

If the shows with Ray Cooper taught me anything, it was that I belonged
onstage. My private life was still the usual chaos of different boyfriends and
drugs — at one point I was rushed from Woodside to hospital with what was
reported as a heart problem, but in reality had nothing to do with my heart
and everything to do with electing to play tennis against Billie Jean King in
the immediate aftermath of yet another coke binge. Victim of Love aside, my
albums were selling OK — its follow-up, 21 at 33, went gold in America in
1980 — but they clearly weren’t selling like they used to, even though I’d
started working with Bernie again, albeit tentatively, just a couple of songs
each time. Sometimes the lyrics he gave me seemed quite pointed. You didn’t
have to be a genius to work out what he was driving at when he sent me a
song called ‘White Lady White Powder’, a portrait of a hopeless cocaine
addict. I had the brass balls to sing it as if it was about someone else.

But onstage, everything else melted away for a couple of hours. After 21

at 33 was released, I headed out on a world tour. I had re-formed the original
Elton John Band — me, Dee and Nigel — and augmented them with a couple
of stellar session guitarists, Richie Zito and Tim Renwick, and James Newton
Howard on keyboards. For the shows with Ray, I had dressed down, leaving
the theatrics to him, but now, I decided to go to town again. I contacted my
old costumier Bob Mackie and a designer called Bruce Halperin and told
them both to do their worst: the flares and platforms were obviously gone, in
keeping with changing fashions, but Bruce came up with something that
resembled a military general’s uniform covered in red and yellow
thunderflashes and arrows, with lapels that looked like a piano keyboard and
a peaked cap to match.

The gigs were bigger than ever. In September 1980, I played in front of
half a million people in Central Park, the largest crowd I’d ever performed to.
For the encore, Bob had made me a Donald Duck costume. It was a fantastic
idea in theory, but the practicalities of it left a little to be desired. First of all, I
couldn’t get the bloody thing on properly. I was backstage, with one arm
through the leg hole and my leg through the arm, crying with laughter while
everyone around urged me to get a move on: ‘There’s 500,000 people out
there and they’|l think there’s no encore! They’! think the gig’s over and go
home!’ When I eventually got onstage it struck me that I should probably
have had some kind of dress rehearsal to see how the outfit might work. Had
I done that I might have discovered that there were two minor problems.
First, I couldn’t walk in it — it had huge duck feet, like divers’ flippers. And
secondly, I couldn’t sit down in it either — it had an enormous padded bum
that meant the best I could manage was perching gingerly on the piano stool.
I attempted to play ‘Your Song’, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Every time I
caught Dee’s eye — wearing an expression of weary resignation, the look of a
man who had turned up again after five years to discover that things were as
ridiculous as ever — I had a fit of the giggles. Once again, Bernie’s tender
ballad of blossoming young love was decimated by my choice of stage wear.

But the duck costume aside, it was a fantastic show: perfect New York
autumn weather, audience members climbing the trees to get a better view. I
played ‘Imagine’, and dedicated it to John Lennon. I hadn’t seen him for a
few years. He’d really gone to ground after Sean was born — probably the last

thing he wanted to be reminded of was the boozy madness of 1974 and 1975.
But after the gig there was a big party on the Peking, a ship that had been
converted into a floating museum on the East River, and he and Yoko
showed up, completely out of the blue. He was as hilarious as ever, full of
excitement about making a new album, but I was too exhausted to stay long.
We said we’d meet up again next time I was in New York.

The tour moved on, crossing America, then heading down to Australia.
Our plane had just landed in Melbourne when a stewardess’s voice came Over
the tannoy, saying that the Elton John party couldn’t disembark; we had to
stay onboard. It’s strange, the moment they said it, my heart sank; I just knew
it meant someone was dead. My first thought was that it was my
grandmother. Every time I went away and popped into the Orangery to say
goodbye to her, I wondered if she’d still be there when I came back. John
Reid went to the cockpit to find out what was going on, and came back in
tears, looking completely bewildered. He told me John Lennon had been
murdered.

I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t just the fact of his death, it was the brutality
of how it happened. Other friends of mine had died young: first Marc Bolan
in 1977 and then Keith Moon in 1978. But they hadn’t died the way John
died. Marc had been killed in a car crash and Keith had basically died from
an incurable case of being Keith Moon. They hadn’t been murdered, by a
complete stranger, outside their home, for no reason whatsoever. It was
inexplicable. It was inconceivable.

I didn’t know what to do. What could you do? Rather than flowers, I sent
Yoko a huge chocolate cake. She always loved chocolate. There was no
funeral to go to, and we were still in Melbourne when the memorial Yoko
had asked for took place on the Sunday after his death. So we hired the city
cathedral and held our own service at exactly the same time people gathered
in Central Park. We sang the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is My Shepherd’,
everyone crying: the band, the road crew, everyone. Later, Bernie and I wrote
a song for him, ‘Empty Garden’. It was a great lyric. Not mawkish or
sentimental — Bernie knew John too, and knew he would have hated anything
like that — just angry and uncomprehending and sad. It’s one of my favourite
songs, but I hardly ever play it live. It’s too hard to perform, too emotional.

Decades after John died, we put ‘Empty Garden’ in one of my Las Vegas
shows and used beautiful images of him given to us by Yoko on the screens. I
still used to tear up every time I sang it. I really loved John, and when you
love someone that much, I don’t think you ever quite get over their death.

A couple of years after John died, I got a phone call from Yoko. She said
she needed to see me, it was urgent, I had to come to New York right away.
So I got on a plane. I had no idea what it was about, but she sounded
desperate. When I arrived at the Dakota, she told me she’d found a load of
tapes with unfinished songs John had been working on just before he died.
She asked me if I would complete them, so they could be released. It was
very flattering, but I absolutely didn’t want to. I thought it was too soon; the
time wasn’t right. Actually, I didn’t think the time would ever be right. Just
the thought of it freaked me out. Trying to work out how to finish songs John
Lennon had started writing — I wouldn’t be so presumptuous. And the idea of
putting my voice on the same record as his — I thought it was horrible. Yoko
was insistent, but so was I.

So it was a very uncomfortable meeting. I felt terrible after I left. Yoko
thought she was honouring John’s legacy, trying to fulfil his wishes, and I
was refusing to help. I knew I was right, but that didn’t make it any less
depressing. (In the end, she put the songs out as they were, on an album
called Milk and Honey.) In search of something to take my mind off it, I went
to the cinema and watched Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. I ended up
laughing my head off at Mr Creosote, the disgusting man who eats until he
explodes. Then I thought how funny John would have found it. It was exactly
his sense of humour: surreal and biting and satirical. I could almost hear his
laugh, that infectious cackle that always used to set me off. That was how I
wanted to remember him. And that’s how I do remember him.

nine

I was awoken by the sound of someone hammering on the door of my hotel
suite. I couldn’t think who it was, because I couldn’t think at all. The moment
I opened my eyes, I realized I had the kind of hangover that makes you think
it’s not a hangover: you can’t possibly feel this ill just through
overindulgence — there has to be something more serious wrong with you. It
wasn’t just my head. My whole body hurt. Especially my hands. Since when
did hangovers make your hands hurt? And why wouldn’t the person knocking
at the door just fuck off, despite my repeated instructions to do so?

Instead, the hammering continued, accompanied by a voice calling my
name. It was Bob Halley. I got out of bed. God, this hangover was
astonishing. I felt worse than I did after Ringo Starr’s 1974 New Year’s Eve
party, and that had started at 8 p.m. and ended around three thirty the
following afternoon. I felt worse than I had in Paris a couple of years before,
when I’d hired an apartment overlooking the Seine, ostensibly to do some
recording, then taken delivery of some pharmaceutical-grade cocaine and
refused to go to the studio at all. John Reid had turned up one morning with
the intention of dragging me to a session, only to discover I was still awake
from the night before and so wasted I was cheerfully hallucinating that the
furniture in the kitchen was dancing with me. It might have been on that same
trip to Paris that I decided to have a shave while completely out of my mind
and — in my altered state — became so overenthusiastic about the very idea of
shaving that I removed not just my stubble but one of my eyebrows, too.
These events tend to blur into one.

I opened the door, and Bob gave me a searching look, like he was

expecting me to say something. When I didn’t, he said, ‘I think you should
come and see this.’

I followed him into his own room. He opened the door to reveal a scene
of total devastation. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture left intact, except
the bed. Everything else was on its side, or upside down, or in pieces. Sitting
among the splinters was a cowboy hat that Bob liked to wear. It was
completely flat, like Yosemite Sam’s after Bugs Bunny drops an anvil on his
head.

‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

There was a long pause. ‘Elton,’ he said eventually. ‘You happened.’

What did he mean, I happened? What was he talking about? I couldn’t see
how this had anything to do with me. The last thing I remembered, I was
having an absolutely marvellous time. So why would I smash anything up?

‘I was in the bar,’ I said indignantly. ‘With Duran Duran.’

Bob gave me another look, one that suggested he was trying to work out
whether I was being serious or not. Then he sighed. ‘Yes, you were,’ he said.
‘At first.’

Ne os

It had all been going so well. It was June 1983, and we were in Cannes,
shooting a video for ‘I’m Still Standing’, which was planned as the first
single off my forthcoming album Too Low for Zero. Ever since the ‘Ego’
debacle, I had tried to have the minimum level of involvement in the making
of videos, but this time I’d decided to push the boat out. That was partly
because the director was Russell Mulcahy, who I’d worked with before, and
really liked. Russell was the go-to man in the early eighties if you wanted
your video glossy, exotic and expensive-looking — he was the guy who flew
Duran Duran to Antigua and filmed them singing ‘Rio’ on a yacht. But it was
also because I wanted ‘I’m Still Standing’ and Too Low for Zero to be
commercial successes. Bernie and I were back writing together full-time. We
had come up with some good songs during our trial separation, but we
realized that we needed to make a whole album together for the partnership to
really click. I’d enjoyed the gigs I’d played with Dee and Nigel, so got my
old band back together in the studio, with Davey on guitar and Ray Cooper

on percussion. My friend from the Royal Academy of Music Skaila Kanga
came and played harp, just as she had on Elton John and Tumbleweed
Connection.

We flew to George Martin’s studio in Montserrat to record, where the
producer Chris Thomas had assembled a really good team of engineers and
tape operators: Bill Price, Peggy McCreary, who arrived fresh from working
with Prince, and a German girl called Renate Blauel. I’d taped some of my
previous album, Jump Up!, there in 1981, but this was different. Bernie was
there and it was the first album to properly reunite the old Elton John Band
since Captain Fantastic in 1975. It was like a well-oiled machine coming
back to life, but the results didn’t sound like the albums we had made in the
1970s, they sounded really fresh. I’d been experimenting more with playing a
synthesizer as well as piano. The songs sparkled: ‘I Guess That’s Why They
Call It The Blues’, ‘Kiss The Bride’, ‘Cold As Christmas’. And ‘I’m Still
Standing’ sounded like the whole album’s calling-card. The lyric was about
one of Bernie’s exes, but I also thought it worked as a message to my new
American record company, who were, quite frankly, turning out to be a
terrible pain in the arse.

Geffen Records was a relatively new label — it had been founded in 1980
— but it opened its account by signing the biggest stars it could: not just me,
but Donna Summer, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and John Lennon. All of us
had been lured by David Geffen’s reputation — he had steered The Eagles and
Jackson Browne to success in the seventies — and by the promise of complete
artistic freedom. But my first album for them, 1981’s The Fox, hadn’t done
great. Jump Up! had been an improvement sales-wise, but the only one of
their big signings who thus far had had a big hit for them was John, and that
was because he was murdered. Before his death his album with Yoko,
Double Fantasy, had received bad reviews and sales had been slow. That
seemed a pretty drastic way to get a hit. So Geffen panicked and started doing
ridiculous things. They fired Donna Summer’s producer, Giorgio Moroder,
who had masterminded literally every hit single she had made. They put Joni
Mitchell in the studio with a synthesizer whizzkid called Thomas Dolby,
which was about as appropriate for Joni’s music as putting her in the studio
with an Alpine yodelling choir. They eventually tried to sue Neil Young for

being unpredictable, which if you knew anything at all about his career, was
like suing Neil Young for being Neil Young. I didn’t like the look of any of
it, and thought ‘I’m Still Standing’ sounded like a warning shot across their
bows. It was a big, swaggering, confident fuck-you of a song.

It needed a big, swaggering, confident video to match, and Russell
provided it, a huge production involving aerial shots from helicopters and
legions of dancers wearing body paint and costumes. My convertible Bentley
was brought to Nice for me to cruise along the Croisette in. There was
choreography, in which I was expected to take part, at least initially. Visibly
stunned by my demonstration of the moves I’d honed on the dance floors of
Crisco Disco and Studio 54, the choreographer Arlene Phillips went pale and
suddenly scaled down my involvement in that side of things, until all I really
had to do was click my fingers and walk along the seafront in time to the
music. Perhaps she was afraid I was going to upstage the professionals, and
the thing she later said about me being the worst dancer she’d ever worked
with was a brilliant double-bluff, designed to spare their blushes.

Filming started at 4 a.m. and went on all day. As the sun went down, a
break was called and I went back to my hotel, the Negresco, to freshen up
before the night shoot. I was in the lobby when I bumped into Simon Le Bon.
He was in town with Duran Duran, and they were just heading to the bar. Did
I want to come along? I didn’t know him that well, but I thought a quick
drink might liven me up. I was dithering over what to order, when Simon
asked if I’d ever had a vodka martini. I had not. Perhaps I should try one.

Reports vary about precisely what happened next. I’m afraid I can’t
confirm or deny them because I don’t really remember anything beyond
thinking Duran Duran were enormously jolly company and noticing that the
vodka martini had slipped down remarkably easily. Depending on who you
believe, I had either six or eight more of them in the space of an hour, and a
couple of lines of coke. I then apparently returned to the video set, demanded
they begin running the cameras, took all my clothes off and started rolling
around on the floor naked. John Reid was there, performing as an extra in the
video, dressed as a clown. He remonstrated with me, an intervention I took
very badly. So badly, in fact, that I punched him in the face. Some observers
said it looked like I’d broken his nose. That explained why my hands hurt,

but I was quite shocked. I had never hit anyone in my adult life before, and I
never have since. I hate physical violence to the point that I can’t even watch
a rugby match. Then again, if I was going to break the habit of a lifetime and
punch someone in the face, it might as well be John Reid; he could take it as
payback for thumping me when we were a couple.

John stormed off set, grabbing the keys to the Bentley, and sped away
into the night. The next anybody heard of him was the following day, when
he rang Rocket’s office, screaming at them to call the AA. He had driven
through the night to Calais, jumped on the ferry to Dover, then promptly
broken down. When the breakdown truck arrived, they were understandably
disconcerted to find themselves attending a convertible Bentley driven by a
man in a clown suit and make-up, covered in blood.

After John Reid’s departure, someone else managed to get my clothes
back on — this, I was told, took several attempts — and Bob Halley hustled me
upstairs. I expressed my displeasure about his intervention by smashing up
his hotel room. As a finale, I’d stamped on his hat, then staggered back to my
own room and passed out.

Bob and I sat on the bed in hysterics. There was nothing to do other than
howl with laughter at the awfulness of it all, and then make some apologetic
phone calls. It was a day that should have made me think long and hard about
how I was behaving. But, and you might be ahead of me here, it didn’t work
out that way at all. The main impact the events in Nice had on my life was
that — wait for it — I decided to drink more vodka martinis. From now on,
that’s how an evening out would begin: four or five vodka martinis, then out
to a restaurant — perhaps L’Orangerie if I was in Los Angeles — a bottle anda
half of wine over dinner, then all back to mine to start on the coke and the
spliffs. They became my drink of choice partly because they came with an
added bonus — they made me black out, so I couldn’t remember how
appallingly I’d behaved the night before. Occasionally someone would feel
impelled to ring up and remind me and I would say sorry. I recall one livid
phone call from Bernie after a night at Le Dome, an LA restaurant I had a
financial stake in, where I got drunk and made what I thought was a hilarious
speech, during which I managed to insult John Reid’s mother. But there was
something comforting about not knowing first-hand. It meant I could kid

myself that it probably wasn’t as bad as people had said, or that it was just an
isolated incident. After all, most of the time no one dared say anything,
because of who I was. That’s the thing about success. It gives you a licence to
misbehave, a licence that doesn’t get revoked until your success dries up
completely, or you man up and decide to hand it in yourself. And, for the
time being, there was no danger of either of those things happening to me.

ee SR

I spent the rest of 1983 travelling. I went on holiday with Rod Stewart, which
was becoming a regular event. We’d previously gone to Rio de Janeiro for
the carnival, which was hilarious. Trying to ensure we could identify each
other in the crowds, we had bought sailor suits from a fancy dress shop. We
put them on and left the hotel to discover that a huge naval ship had just
docked in the port and that the streets were thronged with sailors in uniform:
it was like a Royal Navy conference out there. This time, we went on safari to
Africa. We thought that everyone there was going to assume we were
boorish, scruffy rock stars, so insisted on dressing for dinner every night in
full white tie, despite the sweltering heat. Far from being reassured, our
fellow safari-goers — dressed in a way more befitting the climate — kept
passing troubled glances our way, as if the safari party had been joined by a
couple of maniacs.

Next, I went to China with the Watford team, who were flying out on a
post-season tour, the first British football club to be invited to visit. It was
strange, and not unappealing, to be in a country where literally no one, other
than the people I was with, had any idea who I was. And China was
fascinating. It was before the country had really opened up to the West. I
went back there with Watford a couple of years later, and you could see a
Western influence creeping in. There were people cycling around with
microwave ovens strapped to their backs and Madonna records were played
in bars. But, for the moment, it was still like visiting another world. For
reasons known only to the Communist Party of China, no one was allowed to
cheer during football games, so the matches took place in eerie silence. We
went to visit Mao’s tomb, and had a look at him in his crystal coffin, which
was a bizarre experience. I’d seen Lenin’s body in Russia, and he looked

fine, but there was definitely something not right about Mao or, rather, what
had been done to Mao in order to preserve his corpse. He was the same shade
of bright pink as those foam-like shrimp sweets kids used to eat. I don’t want
to cast aspersions on the embalmers who’d worked on him, but Mao looked
suspiciously like he might be going off.

And then, in October, I flew to South Africa and played Sun City, a
spectacularly stupid idea. The campaign against it hadn’t really picked up
steam — that only happened after Queen performed there in 1984 — but there
was still enough controversy around playing in South Africa at all to fuel my
doubts. John Reid assured me it was going to be fine. Black artists had played
at Sun City: Ray Charles, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, even Curtis
Mayfield. How bad could it be if the great poet of the civil rights movement
had agreed to play there? It wasn’t technically in South Africa, it was in
Bophuthatswana. The audiences weren’t racially segregated.

Of course, it wasn’t fine at all. The audience might as well have been
racially segregated — the ticket prices meant black South Africans couldn’t
afford to go even if they wanted to. If I’d bothered to look into it more
closely I’d have found out that when Ray Charles played there, black South
Africans were so enraged that they stoned his tour bus, and his concerts in
Soweto had to be cancelled. But I didn’t. I just blundered into it. It wasn’t
like going to Russia in the face of opposition. In South Africa, the people
who were suffering as a result of apartheid really did want artists to boycott
the country. You couldn’t achieve anything positive by going there. So
there’s no point trying to justify it. Sometimes you fuck up, and you have to
hold your hand up and admit it. Every one of those black artists I mentioned
bitterly regretted their decision later, and so did I. When I got back I signed a
public pledge put together by anti-apartheid campaigners, saying I would
never go there again.

Back in England, my father was seriously ill. One of my half-brothers had
come backstage at a gig in Manchester and told me he had a heart problem
and needed a quadruple bypass operation. I’d kept my distance over the
years, but I phoned him at home and offered to pay for him to have the
operation done privately. He flatly refused. It was a shame, as much for his
other kids and my stepmother as anything else: he loved them and they loved

him, and it would have been good for them to try and get his health problems
sorted as quickly as possible. But he didn’t want my help. I suggested we
should meet up in Liverpool, when Watford played there. It wouldn’t be too
far for him to travel. He agreed. Football was the only thing we had in
common. I don’t recall him ever coming to see me play live, or talking about
music with him. What I was doing clearly wasn’t really his thing.

Before the match, I took him to lunch at the Adelphi Hotel. It was fine.
We stuck to cordial small talk. Occasionally the small talk ran out, and there
was an uncomfortable silence, which underlined that we didn’t really know
each other well. I was still angry at him for the way he’d treated me, but I
didn’t bring that up. I didn’t want a huge confrontation, because it would
have ruined the day, and because I was still scared of him: my life had
changed so much over the years, but our relationship was still frozen in 1958.
We watched the match from the director’s box. Watford got hammered 3-1 —
we hadn’t been long in the First Division, and the team just seemed overawed
by playing in a huge stadium like Anfield — but I still think he enjoyed it,
although it was hard to tell. I suppose, deep down, I’d hoped that he might be
impressed by the fact that I was now chairman of the club he’d taken me to
see as a kid, that Watford fans now chanted ‘Elton John’s Taylor-made army’
when we scored or pushed forward on the pitch. If I couldn’t get a ‘well
done, son, I’m proud of you’ out of him for my music, then maybe I could for
what we’d achieved at Watford. But it never happened. I’ve turned it over in
my mind since, and I can’t work out whether he had a problem expressing
things like that to me, or whether he felt embarrassed over being wrong about
the choices I’d made against his wishes. Still, we parted on relatively good
terms. I never saw him again. I couldn’t see the point. There was no real
relationship to repair. Our lives had been completely separate for decades.
There weren’t beautiful childhood reminiscences to be picked over and
savoured.

OG ae

In December 1983 we went back to Montserrat. Too Low for Zero had been a
huge hit, the biggest album I’d made for nearly a decade — platinum in Britain
and America, five times platinum in Australia — so for the follow-up, we

decided to repeat the formula: Bernie writing all the lyrics, the old Elton John
Band providing the music, Chris Thomas producing. In fact the only real
change to the team was that Renate Blauel was promoted from tape operator
to engineer. She was conscientious and everyone liked her — the other
musicians, the crew, Chris. She was quiet but tough and self-possessed.
Recording studios in those days were a real boys’ club, you really didn’t find
many women working in them, but she was making a career for herself just
by being incredibly good at what she did; she’d stepped up and worked as an
engineer for The Human League and The Jam.

I flew out on Boxing Day and arrived in a foul mood. My mum and Derf
had come to Woodside for Christmas, and Mum had immediately slipped into
her old role of managing the house and being foul to the staff. She’d had a
huge row with one of the cleaners, which had turned into a huge row with
me, and she and Derf had stormed out on Christmas Eve.

But I perked up on arrival. Tony King had flown in the day before me —
he’d come out to stay over New Year. He was living in New York now,
working for RCA with Diana Ross and Kenny Rogers. He’d given up
drinking, joined AA and looked great, although he had some terrifying stories
about what was happening in the gay community in Greenwich Village and
on Fire Island as a result of a new disease called AIDS. We messed around in
the studio, me inventing characters — an elderly aristocrat called Lady Choc
Ice, a lugubrious, Nico-like singer called Gloria Doom — and Tony pretending
to interview them. We both thoroughly approved of the boy who took
Renate’s old tape operator job, Steve Jackson: he was blond and gorgeous.

After a few days, Tony left to go back to New York. I called him there a
couple of weeks later, and told him I had some news.

‘I’m getting married,’ I said.

Tony laughed. ‘Oh yes? And who are you getting married to? That
glamorous tape operator? Are you going to be Mrs Jackson?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m getting married to Renate.’

Tony kept laughing.

‘Tony,’ I said, ‘I’m serious. I’ve asked Renate to marry me and she’s said
yes. The wedding’s in four days’ time. Can you get a plane to Sydney?’

The laughter at the other end of the phone stopped very abruptly.

oe

I had arrived in Montserrat with my latest boyfriend in tow, an Australian
called Gary, who I’d met in Melbourne a couple of years before. It was
another in an endless line of young, blond, pretty hostage situations. I’d fallen
for him, then set about my usual foolproof course of making both our lives a
misery. I had convinced him to leave Australia and come and live with me at
Woodside, showered him with gifts, then become bored and got Bob Halley
to send him home. We would get in touch again, I’d have a change of heart
and ask him to come back to Woodside, then get bored and tell Bob to book
him a ticket back to Brisbane. It was going nowhere, other than round and
round in circles. Why was it always like this? I knew I was at fault, but I was
too stupid to work out what I was doing wrong. Cocaine’s like that. It makes
you egotistical and narcissistic; everything has to be about what you want.
And it also makes you completely erratic, so you actually have no idea what
you want. That’s a pretty dismal cocktail for life in general, but for any kind
of personal relationship, it’s lethal. If you fancy living in a despondent world
of unending, delusional bullshit, I really can’t recommend cocaine highly
enough.

But back in Montserrat, the songs came thick and fast, and there was one
other bright side to the recording sessions. I started spending more and more
time with Renate. I really enjoyed her company. She was smart and kind and
very, very funny — she had a very British sense of humour. She was very
beautiful, but didn’t seem aware of it, always dressed down in jeans and a T-
shirt. She seemed a little isolated and lonely, a woman in a man’s world, and
isolated and lonely was exactly how I felt inside. We got on incredibly well;
so well, I became more interested in talking to her than I was in spending
time with Gary. I would invent reasons for us to hang out together, ask her
back to the studio after dinner on the pretext of listening to the day’s work,
just so we could talk. On more than one occasion, I found myself idly
reflecting that she was everything that I would have wanted a woman to be, if
I was straight.

Obviously, that was a big if. In fact, it was an if so immense that it would
have taken an astonishing amount of convoluted, irrational thinking to see it

as anything other than completely insurmountable. Luckily, convoluted,
irrational thinking was very much my forte in those days, and I quickly set to.
What if the problem with my relationships wasn’t me? What if it was the fact
that they were gay relationships? What if a relationship with a woman could
make me happy in a way that relationships with men had thus far failed to
do? What if the fact that I enjoyed Renate’s company so much wasn’t a kind
of affectionate bond between two lonely people a long way from home, but a
sudden and unexpected stirring of heterosexual desire? What if I’d only spent
the last fourteen years sleeping with men because I hadn’t found the right
woman yet? And what if I now had?

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that it was true. It was a
tricky line of argument that didn’t really hold up to close scrutiny, or indeed
any scrutiny whatsoever. But tricky as it was, it was easier than facing up to
the real problem.

We were both drunk in a restaurant called the Chicken Shack when I first
mooted the idea of getting married. Renate understandably laughed it off,
assuming it was a joke. Up to that point, there hadn’t been any hint of actual
romance between us, not so much as a kiss. If I’d had any sense, I would
have left it at that. But by now I’d absolutely convinced myself that this was
the right thing. It was what I wanted; it was going to solve all my problems at
a stroke. In my own way, I was infatuated: with the idea of getting married,
with Renate’s company. I missed her when she wasn’t there. It felt
remarkably like I was in love.

So when the whole entourage moved from Montserrat to Sydney — me
and the band to prepare for an Australian tour, Renate and Chris Thomas to
mix the album — I took her out for dinner to an Indian restaurant and asked
her again. I loved her and I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. We
should get married. We should do it right away, here in Australia. It was 10
February 1984 — we could get married on Valentine’s Day. I could make this
happen. It was insanity, but it sounded romantic. Renate said yes.

ee Oe

We rushed back to the hotel we were staying in, the Sebel Townhouse,
assembled everyone in the bar and announced the news: ‘Hey! Guess what?’

It was greeted by a sea of aghast faces, not least Gary’s, who’d travelled to
Australia with us and now suddenly found himself my ex-boyfriend once
more. I asked John Reid and Bernie to be my best men. The resulting party
broke the record for the amount of money spent in the bar in one night.
Everyone clearly needed a stiff drink in order to process what had just
happened.

The next few days passed by in a blur. There was a reception to organize,
a church to find, problems with getting a marriage licence at short notice to
overcome. I spoke to Renate’s father on the phone, asking for her hand in
marriage. He was a businessman from Munich, and extremely gracious, given
that he had just been informed, out of the blue, that his daughter was going to
marry a famously homosexual rock star in four days’ time. I rang my mum
and Derf and told them. They seemed as bemused as everyone else, although,
like everyone else, they didn’t attempt to stop me. There was no point. At that
stage in my life, what I said went and if anyone tried to challenge me, people
got screamed at and inanimate objects got thrown and smashed. It’s nothing
to be proud of, but that’s how it was. Instead, some friends tried to make
sense of what I was doing, usually coming to the conclusion that I was
getting married because I’d decided I wanted children. I let them think that —
in all honesty, it was a more plausible explanation than the truth — but nothing
could have been further from my mind. Nearly forty, and more than capable
of behaving like a child myself, the last thing I needed was an actual child
thrown into the equation. Perhaps if she’d had more time to mull it over,
Renate might have changed her mind. But I don’t think she would have done.

The wedding itself was as straightforward as any wedding can be at
which one of the groom’s best men is his former lover, to whom he lost his
virginity. Renate wore a white lace dress with a gold and diamond pendant
I’d bought her as a wedding gift. She had flowers in her hair. She looked
beautiful. Neither my parents nor Renate’s were there, but plenty of friends
flew in: Tony King, Janet Street-Porter. Bernie’s new wife Toni was one of
the bridesmaids. Rod Stewart couldn’t make it, but his manager Billy Gaff
sent a telegram: ‘You may still be standing, dear,’ it read, ‘but the rest of us
are on the fucking floor.’

On the steps of the church, we were surrounded by fans and paparazzi.

People were cheering and applauding. Out of a nearby window, someone
cranked their stereo up and played ‘Kiss The Bride’ from Too Low for Zero,
which, despite its title, is about the least appropriate song to play at a
wedding this side of Tammy Wynette’s ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’. Over the strains of
me singing ‘Don’t say “I do” — say “bye-bye”‘, a voice rang out, offering
congratulations in a very Australian way. ‘You finally did it!’ the voice
bellowed. ‘Good on you, you old poof!’

The reception was back at the Sebel and was every bit as inconspicuous
and understated as you might expect. White roses had been flown in from
New Zealand, where we were to honeymoon. There was lobster and quail and
loin of venison, vintage Chateau Margaux and Puligny-Montrachet, a five-
tier wedding cake, a string quartet. As was traditional, there were speeches
and the reading of telegrams. As was also traditional, John Reid later
punched someone, a guy from the Sun newspaper, to whose reporting of the
wedding he’d taken exception.

Later, the party moved up to my hotel suite, where there was more booze
and cocaine. At this point, I should say that Renate and I agreed when we
divorced that we would never publicly discuss the intimate details of our
marriage. And I am respecting that. The truth is I don’t have anything bad to
say about Renate at all. Nor does anyone else who met her. The only person
who was cold towards her was my mother, and that was nothing to do with
Renate, or her personality. I just think my mother hated the idea of the apron
strings finally being cut, of someone else occupying the lead role in my life.

The problem was me. I was still capable of locking myself away, alone,
with a load of cocaine whenever I felt like it. Everyone at Woodside was now
well accustomed to my drug use, and just treated it as a fact of life. I can
remember Gladys, one of the cleaners, discreetly taking me aside one day and
saying, ‘I found your special white medicine on the floor while I was
cleaning your room, so | put it in your bedside drawer,’ and there it was, still
on the mirror where I’d been chopping out lines. I suppose I’d thought that
being in a settled relationship might somehow bring an end to that kind of
behaviour. But it didn’t work like that. It didn’t work like that at all.

ten

It’s worth pointing out that Renate didn’t just marry a gay drug addict. That
would have been bad enough. But she married a gay drug addict whose life
was about to go haywire in ways he hadn’t previously thought possible. I had
a couple of years that were normal enough, at least by my standards. I
watched Watford lose the FA Cup Final. I made another album, called Ice on
Fire. Gus Dudgeon produced it, the first time we’d worked together since the
mid-seventies. In Britain, the big hit was ‘Nikita’, a love song to a Russian,
who Bernie, whether by accident or out of mischief, had given a man’s name.
At Live Aid I set up an area backstage with fake grass and a barbecue, so
other artists could drop by. Freddie Mercury arrived, still on a high from
Queen’s show-stealing performance, and offered a very Freddie-esque
appraisal of the hat I’d chosen to perform in: ‘Darling! What the fuck were
you wearing on your head? You looked like the Queen Mother!’ I went to
Wham!’s farewell concert at Wembley in the summer of 1986, where I
marked George Michael’s momentous decision to leave the frivolity of pop
music behind and announce himself a mature singer-songwriter by turning up
in a Reliant Robin, dressed as Ronald McDonald. George wanted to sing
‘Candle In The Wind’ as a mark of his new seriousness, but onstage I struck
up with a pub piano version of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ instead.

But later that year, things started to go seriously off-piste for me. It began
when I noticed there was something wrong with my voice while on tour in
America. It was very odd. I was playing Madison Square Garden and I could
sing fine, but found I couldn’t speak in anything louder than a whisper
offstage. I decided the best course of action would be to rest my voice

between shows and make a joke out of it. I got hold of a Harpo Marx wig and
a raincoat and took to wearing it backstage, honking a horn instead of
speaking.

But my voice got worse when we got to Australia. Just as we arrived, my
new album came out. It was called Leather Jackets, and it was about as close
to an unmitigated disaster as anything I’ve ever released. I had always tried to
be strict about not using drugs in the studio, but this time, that rule went
completely out of the window. The coke had precisely the impact on my
creative judgement you might expect. I stuck any old crap on Leather
Jackets. The big single was meant to be ‘Heartache All Over The World’, a
song so lightweight you could have lifted it up with your little finger. There
were old out-takes, songs that weren’t good enough for earlier albums but
that, after a couple of lines, I suddenly recognized as lost masterpieces the
public needed to hear as a matter of urgency. There was a terrible song I co-
wrote with Cher called ‘Don’t Trust That Woman’, the lyrics of which were
beyond belief: ‘you can rear-end her, oooh, it’ll send her’. You could tell
what I thought of that by the fact that I declined to put my own name to it,
crediting the song to Cher and my old made-up studio character Lady Choc
Ice. Of course, if you hate a song so much that you won’t actually admit you
wrote it, it’s generally speaking a good idea not to record and release it, but I
was So wasted that any kind of logic was completely beyond me.

It wasn’t all bad: ‘Hoop Of Fire’ was pretty classy, especially compared
to the company it was keeping, while a ballad called ‘I Fall Apart’ was
another example of Bernie’s uncanny ability to put words in my mouth that
so perfectly expressed my personal situation I might have written them
myself. But there was no getting around the fact that, overall, Leather Jackets
had four legs and a tail and barked if a postman came to the door.

So I wanted the subsequent tour to be something special, an event so
ambitious and spectacular it would obliterate the memory of the album that
preceded it. I told Bob Mackie to go as crazy as he liked on the costume
front, which is how I ended up onstage in Australia variously wearing a giant
pink Mohican wig with leopardskin sides, another wig based on the explosive
hairstyle made famous by Tina Turner in the eighties, and an outfit that made
me look like Mozart had joined a glam rock band — a white sequinned suit

teamed with an eighteenth-century powdered wig, white make-up and a fake
beauty spot. The Mozart outfit was intended as a wry comment on the second
half of the show, during which I was performing with the Melbourne
Symphony Orchestra. If anyone thought I was being pretentious, a rock star
carrying on like a great classical composer, well, I had made the connection
first.

Going on tour with an orchestra and playing rock and roll was something
that no one had ever tried before. It meant that, for the first time, I could
perform the songs from my early albums live exactly as they had been
recorded, complete with Paul Buckmaster’s beautiful arrangements. Gus
Dudgeon flew out to oversee the sound. We miked up every instrument in the
orchestra individually, which no one had ever done before either, and the
effect was astonishing: when the strings came in on ‘Madman Across The
Water’, it took the top of your head off. They made a hell of a sound — with
the bass cellos and the double basses in full flight, I could feel the stage
vibrating underneath me — which was just as well, as the star attraction was
struggling to make any sound whatsoever.

For a singer, it was the most bizarre, disconcerting sensation: whenever I
opened my mouth onstage, I had absolutely no idea what was going to
happen. Sometimes I would sound fine. Other times I would rasp and croak
and wheezily fail to hit the notes. For some reason, it particularly seemed to
affect me when I spoke rather than sang. I’d try to introduce a song and
literally nothing would come out at all. It was as if someone had answered
certain critics’ long-held prayers by discovering a way of switching me off.

Something was clearly very wrong. For a while, I kept faith in the old
sore throat remedy that Leon Russell had given me backstage at the
Troubadour in 1970, gargling with honey, cider vinegar and water as hot as I
could stand. It made no difference whatsoever. Eventually, after a show in
Sydney during which the loudest sounds I emitted came not during the songs
but between them — when I was racked by coughing fits and spat up gunk in a
variety of colours so lurid that Bob Mackie’s costumes looked sober by
comparison — sanity prevailed and I agreed to see an ear, nose and throat
specialist called Dr John Tonkin.

He examined my larynx and told me I had cysts on my vocal cords. He

didn’t know at this stage whether they were cancerous or benign. If they were
cancerous, that was it — my larynx would have to be removed and I would
never speak again, let alone sing. He wouldn’t know for sure until he
performed a biopsy. Then he looked at me and frowned. ‘You smoke dope,
don’t you?’ he said.

I completely froze. I’d only started smoking spliffs to take the edge off all
the cocaine I was doing, but had quickly discovered I enjoyed them in their
own right. It was a different kind of drug to coke and booze, which I thought
made me more sociable, despite an ever-increasing mountain of evidence to
suggest they were making my behaviour about as antisocial as it was possible
to get.

But marijuana didn’t make me want to go out and party, or stay up for
days on end. It just made me laugh and made music sound fantastic. I had a
particular love for getting stoned and listening to Kraftwerk: their music was
so simple and repetitious and hypnotic. Of course, being me, I couldn’t just
occasionally smoke a spliff and enjoy listening to Trans-Europe Express or
The Man Machine. I immediately became as gung-ho for weed as I was for
everything else. By the time of the Australian tour, one member of the road
crew was more or less specifically employed just to roll joints. He went
everywhere we did, carrying a shoebox full of the things.

When Dr Tonkin questioned whether I smoked dope, I decided to skip
over the finer details of the spliff-roller on staff. ‘A bit,’ I croaked. Dr Tonkin
rolled his eyes, firmly said, ‘I think you mean “a lot”,’ and told me to stop. It
might well have directly caused the cysts, and even if it hadn’t, it certainly
wasn’t helping. I never smoked another joint. I wasn’t exactly the master of
personal resolve when it came to drink and drugs at that point. I lost count of
the times I told myself ‘never again’ while in the grip of a terrible hangover,
only to forget I’d ever said it when the hangover wore off. Sometimes I
would stick to my decision for months but, sooner or later, I always ended up
going back. It turns out there’s nothing like being absolutely terrified to help
you quit something, and nothing like the word ‘cancer’ to make you
absolutely terrified. Dr Tonkin also told me I should cancel the rest of the
Australian tour, but I refused: there was still a week of shows in Sydney to
go. For one thing, the cost of cancelling would have been astronomical —

there were over a hundred musicians involved, we were supposed to be
making a film of the shows and recording them for a live album. But more
importantly, if there was a chance I was never going to sing again, I at least
wanted to put off the day I stopped as long as I could.

I decided I would take the same stoic, show-must-go-on attitude when I
told the band and crew what had happened. Instead, I walked into the bar of
the Sebel Townhouse — yes, there again — croakily announced, “They think
I’ve got throat cancer,’ and then burst into tears. I couldn’t help it. I was so
scared. Even if the operation was successful, even if the biopsy came back
clear, I might still be done for, at least as a singer — Julie Andrews had come
out of an operation to remove a cyst on her vocal cords with her voice
completely destroyed.

We finished the tour. Sick and terrified, I stormed out of the final gig at
the Sydney Entertainment Centre, which was being broadcast live on TV,
minutes before the show was about to start. I could hear the orchestra playing
the overture as I hurried out of the venue. I passed Phil Collins, who was
coming in: he was taking his seat at the last moment so as not to be bothered
by fans. He looked quite startled to see the star attraction heading in the
opposite direction.

‘Oh, hello, Elton ... hang on, where are you going?’

‘Home!’ I shouted, not stopping.

I had a bit of a history of storming out of venues when I was meant to be
onstage. A few years previously I had walked out of a Christmas show at the
Hammersmith Odeon in a fury in between the end of the set and the encore.
My car got as far as the Hogarth Roundabout before I calmed down and
decided to return: it’s about ten minutes away from the venue, but when we
turned the car around, we realized the route back was going to take even
longer, because it involved going round a one-way system. Amazingly, the
audience were still there when I got back.

This time, I didn’t even make it to the car before I had a change of heart.
It turned out to be the best show of all. The thought that I might never sing
again carried me through it. The highlight was ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down
On Me’. My voice was rough and raspy, but I don’t think I’ve ever
performed that song better: it was always pretty show-stopping with the

orchestra thundering away, but that night, every line seemed to have a new
meaning, a different emphasis.

After the tour, I went into hospital in Australia and had the operation. It
couldn’t have gone better. There was no cancer. The cysts were removed.
After I recovered, I realized that it had changed my voice for good, but I liked
how it sounded. It was deeper and I couldn’t sing falsetto anymore, but there
was something about the sound I liked. It felt more powerful, more mature; it
had a different kind of strength. I couldn’t believe my luck. I thought 1987
had got off to a bad start, but now, the only way was up. I couldn’t have been
more wrong.

SE OR

The first headline appeared in the Sun in February 1987 — ELTON IN VICE
BOYS SCANDAL. But, in retrospect, it was always only a matter of time
until the Sun came after me: I was gay, I was successful, I was opinionated,
which in the Sun’s eyes made me fair game for a vendetta. Its editor at the
time was called Kelvin MacKenzie, a man so toxic the Environment Agency
should have cordoned him off. Under his control the Sun wasn’t really a
newspaper so much as a spirited daily attempt to see how much racism,
misogyny, xenophobia and, especially, homophobia could be crammed into
sixty-four tabloid pages. It’s hard to get across to anyone who doesn’t
remember the Sun in the eighties just how nasty it was. It treated people like
shit, whether they were famous or not. It found a loophole in the law that
enabled it to identify rape victims if no one had been arrested for the crime. It
offered homosexuals money to leave Britain: FLY AWAY GAYS AND WE
WILL PAY. When a TV actor called Jeremy Brett was dying of heart
disease, the Sun sent journalists along to confront him in hospital and ask him
if he had AIDS, a disease it also told its readers they couldn’t contract
through straight sex.

I read the story about me with my mouth hanging open. The irony was
that there were dozens of men, all around the world, who could theoretically
have sold a sex and drugs exposé on me: ex-boyfriends, disgruntled one-night
stands. On the evidence of their first exposé, however, the Sun had managed
to unearth someone I’d never actually met, who’d sold them a story about an

orgy somewhere I hadn’t been — the home of Rod Stewart’s manager Billy
Gaff.

In fairness, though, had they found someone who had actually slept with
me, they couldn’t have got a story like this. It wasn’t so much that it was
completely fabricated, although it was. It was that it seemed to have been
completely fabricated by a raving lunatic. I had allegedly readied myself for
the orgy by donning a pair of ‘skimpy leather shorts’. Leather shorts? I’ve
worn some ridiculous old tat in my time, but I’ve never, ever prepared for a
night of passion by squeezing into a pair of leather shorts — you know, I’m
trying to get someone to sleep with me, not take one look and run in the
opposite direction, screaming. Furthermore, I was apparently ‘twirling a sex
aid’ between my fingers and ‘looking like Cleopatra’. Ah, of course,
Cleopatra: last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, lover of Julius Caesar and
Mark Antony, and history’s most celebrated dildo-twirler and wearer of
leather shorts.

On one level, it was laughable, but on another, it wasn’t funny at all. It
was implying that the rent boys involved had been underage. If you repeat a
lie often enough, people think it’s true, especially if it’s in print. What if
people actually believed this? What the hell was I supposed to do? My mum
and Derf were going to read this; maybe my grandmother. Oh God, Auntie
Win: she had a job in a newsagent. I could imagine her taking delivery of that
morning’s Sun, horrified; selling copies of it to people who knew who her
nephew was and were laughing at her.

My initial reaction was to just lock myself away in Woodside and hit the
vodka martinis. Then I got a phone call, from Mick Jagger. He’d seen the
story and wanted to offer some advice. He told me I shouldn’t, under any
circumstances, try and sue them. When he’d issued a writ against the News of
the World after they’d falsely claimed he’d bragged to an undercover reporter
about his drug use in the sixties, they had reacted by spying on him and then
setting up the famous drug bust at Redlands: he and Keith Richards had
ended up in prison, before a public outcry caused their sentences to be
overturned. Weirdly, the conversation had the opposite effect to the one Mick
intended. As I pointed out to Mick, I didn’t really care what the press said
about me. I’d occasionally get upset about a bad review or a hurtful remark,

but that’s the way it goes if you put yourself in the public eye. You just have
to suck it up and get over it. But why should I let them get away with telling
lies about me?

I could prove that what they were saying wasn’t true. On the date I was
supposed to have been at Billy Gaff’s house, dressed up like an extra in a
Village People video and waving a dildo around like a majorette, I had been
in New York, having lunch with Tony King and discussing the finer points of
my Tina Turner wig with Bob Mackie. There were hotel bills, restaurant
receipts and plane tickets to prove it. I had the money to take them to court.
Fuck them. I was going to sue.

After I issued the first writ, the Sun published more and more stories,
filled with more and more lies: every time one appeared, I issued another
libel writ against them. Some of the lies were really unpleasant — they
claimed I’d paid rent boys to let me urinate on them — and others were just
bizarre. There was a claim I kept Rottweiler dogs with their voice boxes cut:
ELTON’S SILENT ASSASSINS. The only problem with this story was that I
didn’t own any Rottweiler dogs, only two German shepherds, both of whom
nearly deafened the RSPCA when they came down to check on their welfare.
The Sun kept going even when it became apparent that the public didn’t want
to know. What they were doing clearly wasn’t affecting my popularity at all —
the stories were reported all around the world, but the live album we’d
recorded on the Australian tour was a huge hit, platinum in America, and the
version of ‘Candle In The Wind’ released from it as a single unexpectedly
went Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic. What they were affecting was the
Sun itself. Every time they put a story about me on the front of the paper, the
newspaper’s sales dipped. I don’t know whether people realized it was all
untrue, or whether they saw it as a vendetta against me and thought it was
unfair, or whether they were just bored stiff of hearing about it.

Knowing they were in trouble, the Sun became increasingly frantic in
their attempts to get something on me, anything that would actually stick. I
was followed everywhere I went. When I stayed at the Century Plaza in Los
Angeles, the penthouse suite was bugged. We had been warned by our
solicitors that it might be — it was the suite where President Reagan always
stayed — so we had the room swept by the FBI. Someone was trying to

frighten me, trying to make me call the lawyers off. They offered to pay any
rent boy £500 to say he’d slept with me. Not surprisingly, they were
inundated with candidates, but they were all so obviously making it up that
even the Sun baulked at using them.

The best they could manage was to get hold of some Polaroids that had
been stolen from my house. They were about ten years old. One of them
featured me giving a guy a blow job. They printed them in the paper, which
was mortifying. I tried to console myself with the thought that at least I could
claim it as another first in my career — first artist in history to debut at the top
of the US charts with two consecutive albums; first artist in history to have
seven American Number Ones in a row; first artist in history to appear in a
national newspaper giving someone a blow job. Besides, it seemed like a sign
of desperation on the part of the Sun. Gay man sucks penis: it’s not exactly a
Pulitzer-winning scoop. In addition, it was written up in a way that I couldn’t
help but think told you more about the journalist than about me. It was all
‘disgusting’ this and ‘private perversion’ that. How boring does your sex life
have to be for a blow job to count as the height of unimaginable depravity?

It went on and on, for months and months, until I’d issued seventeen libel
writs against them. I’d love to tell you that I never wavered in my conviction
that I would defeat them, but it wasn’t like that. Some days I would be fine,
righteously angry, ready to take them on. Other days I would be in tears,
totally despairing, even ashamed. I hadn’t done any of the things they had
said I’d done, but I knew I’d laid myself open to something like this
happening. My drug use was an open secret. I certainly hadn’t slept with
anyone underage, but then nor had I always been hugely discriminating in my
choice of partners. A few years before, someone I slept with had helped
themselves to a sapphire and diamond ring, a watch and some cash before
they left. I worried about the court case, about having my private life
dissected in public, about what the Sun would do to try and smear me.

The thought of it made me do what I’d always done when things got too
much. I would shut myself away in my room, just like I had as a kid when my
parents were fighting, and try and ignore what was happening. The only
difference was that now I would shut myself away with an abundant supply
of booze and drugs. I wouldn’t eat for three days, then I would wake up

starving and stuff myself with food. I would panic about gaining weight and
make myself sick by jumping up and down until I puked. I had developed
bulimia, although at the time I didn’t know what bulimia was. What I did
know was that certain foods were easier to throw up straight away than
others. Anything stodgy like bread was difficult; you ended up bent over the
toilet, retching and retching. I realized that you had to stick to things that
were soft, so my diet became bizarre. When I was bingeing, my idea of a
meal became two jars of Sainsbury’s cockles and a pint of Haagen-Dazs
peanut butter ice cream. I’d shovel it in then bring it up again, sneaking off to
make myself sick, thinking that no one would notice. Obviously they did —
you come back smelling of puke, looking as if you’ve been crying, because
throwing up makes your eyes water — but of course no one would dare to
confront me about it, for fear of the consequences. Everything about it, from
what I ate, to how I behaved, seems completely disgusting now, but back
then, it became second nature to me; it was just how I was.

Still, when things got really bad, I would eventually pull myself out of it,
consoling myself with two thoughts. One was that, as far as the Sun went, I
was absolutely in the right — if a single word of what they had said was true,
then I would never have dared sue them. And the other was that, however
bleak things seemed, I knew of people far, far worse off than me, people
who’d found the strength to deal with problems that made mine look
completely insignificant. I’d first read a Newsweek magazine feature about an
American teenager called Ryan White in a doctor’s waiting room a couple of
years before. I was simultaneously horrified and inspired by his story. He was
a haemophiliac from Indiana, who had contracted AIDS through a blood
transfusion, and AIDS was a disease that had been playing on my mind a
great deal. John Reid’s PA Neil Carter was the first person I knew who died
of it: he was diagnosed, then three weeks later he was dead. After that, the
floodgates just seemed to open. Whenever I spoke to Tony King in America,
where the epidemic was more advanced, he’d tell me of an old friend or a
friend of a friend who was sick. John Reid’s secretary, Julie Leggatt, was the
first woman in Britain to be diagnosed with AIDS. My ex-boyfriend Tim
Lowe had tested positive. So had another ex, Vance Buck, a sweet blond boy
from Virginia, who loved Iggy Pop and whose photo was on the inside cover

of my album Jump Up!, just below the lyrics to ‘Blue Eyes’, the song Gary
Osborne and I[ had written with him in mind. It was horrible, but ask any gay
man who lived through the seventies and eighties and they’ll tell you a
similar story: everyone lost someone, everyone can remember the climate of
fear.

But it wasn’t just the fact that Ryan White had AIDS. It was what had
happened as a result of him contracting the disease. He had been ostracized in
his hometown of Kokomo. The superintendent of his school district refused
to let him attend classes, in case he infected his schoolmates. He and his
mother Jeanne became involved in a protracted legal battle. When the Indiana
department of education ruled in his favour, a group of parents filed an
injunction to block his return: they were allowed to hold an auction in the
school gymnasium to raise funds to keep him out. When that failed, they set
up an alternative school, so that their children didn’t have to go near him. He
was abused in the street, his school locker was spray-painted with the word
FAG and his possessions were vandalized. The tyres on his mother’s car were
slashed and a bullet was shot through the family’s front window. When the
local paper supported him, they received death threats. Even their Methodist
church turned its back on them: when it came to the blessing at their Easter
service, no one in the congregation would shake Ryan’s hand and say ‘peace
be with you’ to him.

Throughout it all, Ryan and his mother Jeanne behaved with unbelievable
dignity, bravery and compassion. Christians who truly held to the teachings
of Christ, they forgave the people who made their already difficult lives even
more hellish. They never condemned, they just tried to educate. Ryan became
an intelligent, sympathetic, articulate spokesman for people with AIDS at a
time when AIDS was still being demonized as God’s vengeance on gays and
drug addicts. When I found out that he liked my music and wanted to meet
me, I got in touch with his mother and invited them to a gig in Oakland, then
took them to Disneyland the next day. I really adored them. Jeanne reminded
me of the women in my family, especially my nan: she was working class,
straight-talking, hard-working, kind but clearly built with an unbreakable
core of steel. And Ryan seemed absolutely remarkable. He was so ill that I
had to push him around Disneyland in a wheelchair, but he wasn’t angry, he

wasn’t bitter, he never cracked. He didn’t want pity or sympathy. Talking to
him, I got the feeling that because he knew he didn’t have much time left to
live, he didn’t want to waste it feeling sorry for himself or angry at others —
life literally was too short. He was just a lovely kid, trying to lead as normal a
life as possible. They were an incredible family.

We kept in touch afterwards. I would call, send flowers, ask if there was
anything I could do to help. Whenever I could see Ryan, I saw him. When
they couldn’t stand it in Kokomo anymore, I loaned Jeanne the money to
move her family to Cicero, a small town outside Indianapolis. I tried to just
give her the money, but she insisted on it being a loan — she even wrote out a
contract and made me sign it. Every time I felt hopeless about the situation I
was in, I thought about them. That was real courage in the face of something
truly appalling. So stop the self-pity. Just get on with it.

Nevertheless, I kept a low public profile until Michael Parkinson got
involved. I’d been on his chat show in the seventies — I’d ended up playing a
pub piano while Michael Caine sang ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner’ —
and we’d subsequently become friends. He contacted me when the Sun’s
stories first appeared and told me he had a new chat show on ITV called One
to One — each episode was devoted to a single guest. Why didn’t I come up to
Leeds and appear on it? I said I wasn’t sure, but he was persistent.

‘I’m not doing this for me,’ he said, ‘I’m doing this for you. I know you, I
know what the Sun are like. You’re not saying anything publicly, and you
need to. If you don’t say anything, people will assume you’ve got something
to hide.’

So I eventually did the show. If you look at the clips of it on YouTube,
you can see the effect that events were having on me. I was unshaven,
dressed down, I looked haggard and pale. But it went well. The audience
were clearly on my side. Michael asked about the Sun and I told him that I’d
just discovered they had tried to bribe the receptionist at my doctor’s to hand
over my medical records.

‘I think they want to examine my sperm,’ I said. ‘Which is odd, because if
you believe the stories they’ve been printing, they must have already seen
bucketloads of it.’

Not long afterwards, the rent boy who had made the initial allegations in

the Sun told another tabloid that he had made them all up, and that he’d never
met me. ‘I don’t even like his music,’ he added. The morning the first libel
case was due to come to court, the Sun completely caved in. They offered to
settle for £1 million. It was the biggest libel payout in British history,
although it was a good deal for them — if it had gone to court, they would
have ended up paying me millions. That night, rather than prepare to take my
turn in the witness box, I went to see Barry Humphries at the Theatre Royal,
Drury Lane, and laughed myself stupid at Dame Edna Everage. Afterwards,
we waited around in the West End to see the first edition of the next
morning’s paper arrive at the news stands. When forced to apologize for
making things up, the Sun was notorious for printing the correction as small
as possible and burying it on here. But I said their apology had to be the same
size as the initial allegations — a banner headline, front page: SORRY
ELTON.

People subsequently said it was a landmark victory that changed British
newspapers, but I’m not sure that it changed the Sun very much. Two years
later, they printed the most notorious load of lies in their history, about the
behaviour of Liverpool fans during the Hillsborough disaster, so it’s not as if
checking their facts suddenly became a huge priority. What did change was
the way newspapers behaved around me, because they realized I would sue
them if they made things up. I did it again a few years later, when the Daily
Mirror claimed I’d been seen at a Hollywood party telling people I’d found a
wonderful new diet, then chewing food and spitting it out instead of
swallowing it: ELTON’S DIET OF DEATH. I hadn’t even been in America
at the time. I got £850,000 and gave it to charity. The money wasn’t the
point. The point was to make something very clear. You can say whatever
you like about me. You can say I’m a talentless, bald old poof, if that’s your
opinion. I might think you’re an arsehole for saying it, but if it was against
the law to express colourful opinions about people, I’d have been locked up
years ago. But you can’t tell lies about me. Or I’Il see you in court.

Renate and I divorced in early 1988. We had been married for four years.
It was the right thing to do, but it was a horrible feeling. I’d broken the heart
of someone I loved and who loved me unconditionally, someone I couldn’t
fault in any way. She could have taken me to the cleaners, and I wouldn’t

have blamed her: everything that had gone wrong was down to me and me
alone. But Renate was too dignified and too decent for that. Despite all the
pain, there was no acrimony involved at all. For years afterwards, whenever
something happened to me, the press would turn up on her doorstep, looking
for her to dish the dirt, and she never, ever has: she just told them to leave her
alone.

I saw her once after we divorced. She had moved out of Woodside to a
beautiful cottage in a small village. For all that had happened, there was still a
very real love there. When I had children, I invited her to Woodside, because
I wanted her to meet them; I wanted to see her, I wanted her to be part of our
lives, and us part of hers, in some way. But she didn’t want to, and I didn’t
push the issue. I have to respect how she feels.

eleven

It was the state of the squash court that made me realize my passion for
collecting had perhaps got the tiniest bit out of control. The squash court was
one of the things that I’d liked about Woodside when I first moved in. I
would challenge anyone who came over to a game. But no one had played
squash at Woodside for some time, because no one could actually get into the
court anymore. The place was full of packing cases, and the packing cases
were full of things I’d bought: on tour, on holiday, from auctions, whatever. I
hadn’t been able to unpack any of it, because there was literally no room
anywhere in the house to put any more stuff. Every inch of wall space was
covered with paintings, posters, gold and platinum discs, framed awards. My
record collection was piled up all over the place. I had a special room for it
that was like a maze, with corridor after corridor of floor-to-ceiling shelving
that housed everything I’d bought since I was a kid: I still had the 78s I’d
spent my pocket money on in Siever’s in Pinner, with ‘Reg Dwight’ written
on the labels in ink and photos of the artists I’d cut out of magazines
Sellotaped to the sleeves. But I’d managed to outgrow the room, by buying
someone else’s record collection as well. He was a BBC radio producer
called Bernie Andrews who had worked on Saturday Club and with John
Peel, and he owned every single released in Britain between 1958 and 1975,
thousands and thousands of the things. Of course, loads of them were
absolutely crap: even in pop’s most miraculous years, the good releases were
outweighed by the bad. But it appealed to my completist collector’s
mentality. Owning every single released in Britain! It was like some mad
childhood fantasy come true.

If I’d just collected records, I might have been able to cope, but I didn’t. I
collected everything: art, antiques, clothes, chairs, jewellery, glassware.
There were beautiful art deco vases and Gallé and Tiffany table lamps just sat
on the floor, because there was no space left on any tables — a pretty
incredible state of affairs given how much furniture I’d managed to cram into
every room. Walking around the house was like taking part in the world’s
most expensive obstacle course. If you put a foot wrong, or turned round too
quickly — which I can tell you for a fact is quite easy to do if you’re spending
a significant portion of your life drunk and on drugs — you could smash
something worth thousands of pounds. It didn’t really make for a terribly
relaxing environment in which to live. I’d have people over and spend half
my time bellowing at them to be careful or to watch what they were doing.
I’d occasionally stick my head round the door of the squash court — there was
just about enough room to do that, if you breathed in — and feel oddly
despairing. Ever since I was a kid, owning things had always made me feel
happy, but now it just made me feel overwhelmed. What was I going to do
with all this stuff?

A few months after Renate and I separated, I came up with a radical
solution. I was going to sell it. All of it. Every painting, every bit of
memorabilia, every stick of furniture, every objet d’art. All the clothes, all the
jewellery, all the glasses, all the gifts that fans had sent me. Everything in the
house, except the records. I got in touch with Sotheby’s, who had recently
held a huge posthumous sale of Andy Warhol’s possessions, and told them I
wanted to auction the lot. They sent experts out to Woodside to have a nose
around. The experts left looking a little faint. I couldn’t work out whether
they were floored by the quantity of stuff I was selling — one of them told me,
in hushed tones, that I had the largest private collection of Carlo Bugatti
furniture in the world — or whether they were just reeling from the sheer
hideousness of some of it. I liked to think I had developed a good eye for art
and furniture, but I also had a remarkably high threshold for gaudy kitsch.
There were things in my home that made my old stage outfits look like the
last word in understated good taste. There was a model of a bonobo gorilla in
an Edwardian dress that a fan had sent me, with an accompanying note
explaining that it was a sculpture representing the futility of war. There was a

radio in the shape of a doll wearing a see-through negligee: the volume and
tuning controls were mounted on her tits. There was a pair of brass bath taps
with large Perspex testicles attached to them.

I decided that I should keep some original Goon Show scripts, complete
with Spike Milligan’s handwritten annotations, that I’d bought at an auction,
and four paintings: two Magrittes, one Francis Bacon portrait of his lover
George Dyer that people had told me I was crazy to spend £30,000 on back in
1973, and The Guardian Readers, the Patrick Procktor painting that had
appeared on the cover of Blue Moves. Everything else could go.

Before you get the wrong idea, I should add that I had absolutely no
intention whatsoever of leading a more simple and meaningful life,
uncoupled from the yoke of consumerism and unencumbered by material
possessions. If anyone thought that, they were swiftly disabused the first time
I went to Sotheby’s for a meeting about the upcoming auction: supposedly
there to discuss disposing of my worldly goods, I instead ended up buying
two paintings by Russian avant-garde artists Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky.
It was more that I wanted a new start. I wanted to completely remodel and
redecorate Woodside. I didn’t want to live in a berserk pop star’s house
anymore, I wanted somewhere that felt like a home.

It took Sotheby’s three days just to transport everything from Woodside
to their London warehouse. There was so much to sell that there had to be
four separate auctions. One was for stage costumes and memorabilia, one for
jewellery, one for art deco and art nouveau and one called ‘diverse
collections’, which had everything in it from Warhol silkscreens to suitcases
to sporrans — at some point I appeared to have bought two of those.

I used a photo of some of the lots on the cover of my new album, which
I'd called Reg Strikes Back: it seemed like the right title, after the events of
1987. Sotheby’s held an exhibition before the auction. They only showed a
quarter of what was up for sale, but it filled the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Bizarrely, the former prime minister, Edward Heath, came to have a look at
it: maybe he was in the market for a pair of bath taps with Perspex testicles
attached. The auctions were a huge success. They had to put up crash barriers
outside to cope with the crowds. Paintings sold for double the anticipated
price. Things that I thought fans might pick up for a few quid went for

thousands. Everything went: the bonobo gorilla representing the futility of
war, the sporrans, the doll-in-a-negligee radio. They even sold the banners
that hung outside Sotheby’s advertising the auction.

I didn’t go. I left Woodside the day the removal vans arrived. I didn’t set
foot in the house again for two years. I wasn’t to know it then, but by the time
I came back, my life would have changed even more than my home had.

ee

I decided to move to London while the house was being emptied. At first I
stayed in a hotel — the Inn On The Park, the location for the famous story
about me ringing the Rocket office and demanding they do something about
the wind outside that was keeping me awake. This is obviously the ideal
moment to state once and for all that this story is a complete urban myth, that
I was never crazy enough to ask my record company to do something about
the weather; that I was simply disturbed by the wind and wanted to change
rooms to somewhere quieter. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that, because the
story is completely true. I absolutely was crazy and deluded enough to ring
the international manager of Rocket, Robert Key, and ask him to do
something about the wind outside my hotel room. I certainly didn’t want to
change rooms. It was 11 a.m., I’d been up all night and there were drugs
everywhere: the last thing I needed was the hotel staff bustling in to help me
move to a different floor. I angrily outlined the situation to Robert. To his
lasting credit, he gave my request very short shrift. On the other end of the
phone, I heard the muffled sound of Robert, with his hand over the receiver,
telling the rest of the office, ‘Oh God, she’s finally lost it.’ Then he spoke to
me again. ‘Elton, are you fucking insane? Now get off the phone and go back
to bed.’

I started renting a house in west London, but I spent most of my time
away on tour or in America. I’d fallen in love with a guy called Hugh
Williams, who lived in Atlanta. But I also found myself in Indianapolis. Ryan
White had been happier since moving to Cicero, but nothing could stop the
progress of his disease. In the spring of 1990, his mother Jeanne called and
told me that he had been rushed into the Riley Hospital for Children with a
severe respiratory infection. He was on life support. I flew there straight

away. For the next week, I tried to make myself useful around the hospital
while Ryan slipped in and out of consciousness. I didn’t know what else to do
to help. I cleared up the room. I fetched sandwiches and ice cream. I put
flowers in vases and bought stuffed animals for the other kids on the ward. I
acted like Jeanne’s secretary, fending off phone calls, doing the job that I
paid Bob Halley to do for me. Ryan had been such a visible advocate for
AIDS sufferers that he had become a celebrity. When the news that he was
dying got out, Jeanne was deluged with people wanting to offer their support
and it was too much for her to deal with. I held the phone up to Ryan’s ear
when Michael Jackson called. All Ryan could do was listen. He was too weak
to answer.

When I went back to my hotel, I would think about Jeanne and her
daughter Andrea. They were watching Ryan die, slowly and painfully. They
had prayed for a miracle, but the miracle never came. They had every right to
feel angry and resentful. But they didn’t feel that way. They were stoic, they
were forgiving, they were patient and kind. Even in the most awful
circumstances I loved being around them, but they made me feel ashamed of
myself, in a way I’d never felt before. I spent half my life feeling angry and
resentful about things that didn’t matter. I was the kind of person who got on
the phone and shouted at people because the weather outside my Park Lane
hotel didn’t suit me. Whatever else had been wrong with my childhood, I
hadn’t been brought up to behave that way. How the fuck had I become like
this? I’d always managed somehow to justify my behaviour to myself, or to
make a joke of it, but now I couldn’t: real life had barged into my celebrity
bubble.

Because they knew I was in Indianapolis, I was asked to play a gig at the
Hoosier Dome for Farm Aid, a charity set up by Neil Young, Willie Nelson
and John Mellencamp. It was a huge event, with everyone from Lou Reed to
Carl Perkins to Guns N’ Roses performing. I had been happy to get involved,
but now I didn’t want to go, because I didn’t want to leave Jeanne by Ryan’s
bedside; I knew he didn’t have long left. I rushed over there and literally ran
onstage in the same clothes I had been wearing at the hospital. I played
without a backing band, raced through ‘Daniel’ and ‘I’m Still Standing’,
dedicated ‘Candle In The Wind’ to Ryan, then ran offstage again. I was back

at the hospital within an hour, and I was there when Ryan died the next
morning, 8 April, at 7.11 a.m. He was eighteen. It was a month before his
high-school graduation.

Jeanne had asked me to be one of the pall-bearers at his funeral, and also
to perform. I sang ‘Skyline Pigeon’ with a photo of Ryan on top of my piano.
It was a song from my first album, Empty Sky, one of the first really good
things Bernie and I had written, and it seemed to fit the occasion: ‘dreaming
of the open, waiting for the day that he can spread his wings and fly away
again’. The funeral was a huge event. It was broadcast live on CNN. Michael
Jackson and the First Lady, Barbara Bush, were there. There were press
photographers everywhere and hundreds of people standing outside in the
rain. Some of the mourners were people who had made the Whites’ lives a
misery back in Kokomo; they came and apologized and asked Jeanne to
forgive them and she did.

Ryan was in an open casket. After the service, family and close friends
filed towards his body to say goodbye. He was wearing his faded denim
jacket and a pair of mirrored sunglasses — his choice of clothes to be buried
in. I put my hands on his face and told him I loved him.

I went back to my hotel in a strange mood. It wasn’t just grief, there was
something else bubbling undermeath: I was angry at myself. I kept turning
over the fact that Ryan had done so much in such a short time to help people
with AIDS. A kid with nothing, and he’d changed public perceptions. Ronald
Reagan, who’d done his best to ignore AIDS while he was president, had
written a piece that the Washington Post published that morning, praising
Ryan and condemning the ‘fear and ignorance’ that surrounded the disease. I
was the highest-profile gay rock star in the world. I’d spent the eighties
watching friends and colleagues and ex-lovers die horribly; years later, I had
all their names engraved on plaques and put them on the wall of the chapel at
Woodside. But what had I done? Virtually nothing. I had made sure I got
tested for HIV every year, and by a miracle I came up negative every time. I
had played a couple of benefit gigs, and helped record a charity single, a
version of Burt Bacharach’s ‘That’s What Friends Are For’, with Dionne
Warwick, Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight. It had been a huge success — it
was the biggest-selling single of the year in America and it raised $3 million.

I had attended some of Elizabeth Taylor’s fundraising events, because I’d
known Liz for years. She had a grand image, but she wasn’t like that at all in
real life. She was incredibly kind and welcoming and she was hilarious — she
had a really filthy English sense of humour — although you had to watch your
jewellery around her. She was obsessed. If you were wearing something she
liked the look of, she’d somehow just charm you into giving it to her; you
would walk into her dressing room wearing a Cartier watch and leave without
it, never entirely sure how she’d managed to get it off you. I suppose she used
exactly the same skill when it came to fundraising. She had the guts to stand
up and do something, helping start the American Foundation for AIDS
Research, forcing Hollywood to pay attention, despite everyone telling her
getting involved with AIDS would damage her career.

I should have been doing the same. I should have been on the front line. I
should have put my head on the chopping block the way Liz Taylor did. I
should have been marching with Larry Kramer and ACT UP. Everything I’d
done so far — charity singles, celebrity fundraisers — seemed superficial and
showbizzy. I should have been using my fame as a platform to gain attention
and make a difference. I felt sick.

I turned on the TV and watched the news coverage of the funeral, which
only made things worse. It was a beautiful service, and my performance had
been fitting. But every time the camera focused on me, I was horrified. I
looked awful in a way that had nothing to do with the tragedy of Ryan’s
death and everything to do with the way I was living my life. I was bloated
and grey. My hair was white. I looked worn out, exhausted, ill. I was forty-
three years old, and I looked about seventy. God, the state of me. Something
had to change.

But not yet. I left Indianapolis and life went back to my idea of normal. I
had recorded a new album before Ryan got really sick, and now I had to
promote it, something I had neglected to do while Ryan was dying. Sleeping
with the Past had been recorded at a studio in rural Denmark called Puk. I
think the idea was partly to try and avoid the press, who were crawling all
over the place because of my divorce from Renate, and partly to try and avoid
the kind of behaviour that had gone on during the making of Leather Jackets.
In a sense it worked. Even I couldn’t figure out how to source any drugs in

the depths of the Danish countryside. It was the middle of winter, freezing
cold, completely desolate: you would have had more luck finding a cocaine
dealer on the moon. But every night we would head out to the nearest town,
Randers, and hit the pubs, marvelling at the way that Danes drank. Lovely
people, very friendly, always happy to appeal to my competitive nature by
challenging us to a game of darts, but you see them around booze and the old
Viking heritage becomes very apparent. I shouldn’t have tried to keep up
with them, but my competitive nature got the better of me there, too. The
schnapps the locals drank was lethal — they called it North Sea Oil. I became
quite used to waking up on the floor of someone else’s room, with my tongue
stuck to the roof of my mouth, gripped by the conviction that this particular
case of alcohol poisoning was going to prove fatal. Other members of the
crew fared even worse than me: on producer Chris Thomas’s birthday, I hired
a brass band to knock on his door first thing in the morning and launch into
‘Happy Birthday To You’. You can imagine how marvellous that sounded to
a man with a raging hangover.

The schnapps, the pubs, the hangovers: it’s worth pointing out that I’m
describing the working week here. At weekends, I let my hair down a bit. I
would fly to Paris and party. There was a gay club I loved on the rue de
Caumartin, called Boy. In truth, I thought I was getting a bit too old for
clubbing, but the music at Boy kept me coming back. Laurent Garnier and
David Guetta DJ’d there — it was the start of house and techno taking over in
Paris’s clubs and it felt as fresh and exciting and bold as disco had back in the
seventies. Whenever I hear ‘Good Life’ by Inner City, I think about the dance
floor in Boy going crazy.

Despite my visits to Paris and the amount of North Sea Oil consumed
during its making, Sleeping with the Past turned out really well. The idea was
to make an album influenced by old soul music, the kind of thing I’d played
in nightclubs in the sixties, hence the title. You can really hear it in songs like
‘Amazes Me’ and ‘I Never Knew Her Name’. In fact, the only track I wasn’t
sure about was a ballad called ‘Sacrifice’. Demonstrating again the infallible
commercial instincts that led me to announce I was going to strangle Gus
Dudgeon if ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ was ever released, I said I
didn’t want it on the album. I was talked round, but then the record company

wanted to release it as a single, which just seemed stupid — it was a five-
minute-long ballad, no one was going to play it. At first, they put it out on the
B-side of a song called ‘Healing Hands’, which I thought was much more
commercial. The single didn’t do much until nearly a year later, in June 1990,
when the DJ Steve Wright started ignoring what it said on the label and
playing the other side on his Radio One show. Then it suddenly took off:
within three weeks I had my first British solo Number One.

Remembering how I felt about my response to the AIDS crisis after
Ryan’s funeral, I decided to donate all the royalties to four British AIDS
charities, and announced I’d do the same thing with every single I released in
future. I gave money to Stonewall, a new charity that was lobbying for LGBT
rights in the wake of Section 28, a recent law that banned local governments
and schools in Britain from ‘promoting’ homosexuality. When I appeared at
the International Rock Awards, a televised ceremony, I called out the host, a
homophobic comedian called Sam Kinison, who specialized in jokes about
AIDS. A week after Ryan’s funeral, he’d been on Howard Stern’s radio
show, sniggering about it. I said I was only there under protest, that Kinison
was a pig and that the awards ceremony should never have employed him.
His response was incredible. He started whining that I owed him an apology
and that what I’d said was ‘way out of line’. A man who went around
laughing at ‘faggots’ dying, whose whole schtick was supposed to be about
causing offence and saying the unsayable, was now apparently terribly
offended himself about being called a name. He could dish it out, but he
couldn’t take it. He could whistle for his fucking apology.

And I played some benefit shows for Ryan’s charity, at the opening of
Donald Trump’s new casino in Atlantic City. Jeanne White was my guest,
but they weren’t great gigs. I was propping myself up with booze and drugs,
making mistakes onstage. It was nothing too drastic — the occasional
forgotten lyric and the odd fluffed piano line. I doubt anyone in the audience
even noticed, and no one in the band mentioned it. I’ve never been big on
post-gig inquests, where you all sit around and talk about where things went
wrong: tell people when they’ve played great, don’t sit there nitpicking over
little errors for hours, just let it go. But deep down I knew I’d broken one of
my unwritten rules. I’d certainly raced offstage at the end of gigs before,

pathetically eager to have a line, but I had made a point of never doing drugs
before going on: that felt like letting an audience down.

Oe ON

Back in Atlanta, Hugh had some news for me. He was sick of drinking and
taking drugs. He knew he couldn’t stop without help. So he was going into
rehab. He had booked into a residential treatment programme at Sierra
Tucson, the same rehab centre that had treated Ringo Starr for alcoholism a
couple of years before. He was leaving that day.

You might think after what had happened in Indianapolis — the shame I’d
felt in the company of Ryan’s mum and sister, the horror of seeing myself at
the funeral — that this would have been news I welcomed. I should have asked
to go with him. Instead, I went ballistic. I was furious. Hugh was my latest
partner-in-crime: if he was admitting he had a problem, that meant I had a
problem. By implication, he was accusing me of being a drug addict.

He wasn’t the first person to suggest I needed help. After he’d stopped
working for me, my valet, Mike Hewitson, had written me a very sane, level-
headed letter — ‘you’ve really got to stop this nonsense, stop putting that
bloody stuff up your nose’ — and I’d responded by refusing to speak to him
for a year and a half. Tony King had tried to talk to me. He had visited me
with Freddie Mercury, and afterwards Freddie had told him that I looked like
I was in trouble and that Tony should get involved: ‘You need to look after
your friend.’ Coming from Freddie, no saint when it came to booze and drugs
himself, that judgement should have carried a lot of weight. Instead, I
dismissed what Tony had to say as sanctimonious preaching from an
alcoholic in recovery. And a couple of years before, George Harrison had
tried to talk to me at an insane party I’d held at a house I was renting in LA.
I’d had the garden strung with lights, got Bob Halley to fire up the barbecue
and invited everyone I knew that was in town. By the middle of the evening, I
was flying, absolutely out of my mind, when a scruffy-looking guy I didn’t
recognize wandered into the party. Who the hell was he? It must be one of
the staff, a gardener. I loudly demanded to know what the gardener was doing
helping himself to a drink. There was a moment’s shocked silence, broken by
the sound of Bob Halley’s voice: ‘Elton, that’s not the fucking gardener. It’s

Bob Dylan.’

Coked out of my brain and keen to make amends, I rushed over and
grabbed him, and started steering him towards the house.

‘Bob! Bob! We can’t have you in those terrible clothes, darling. Come
upstairs and I’ Il fit you out with some of mine at once. Come on, dear!’

Bob stared at me, horrified. His expression suggested he was trying hard
to think of something he wanted to do less than get dressed up like Elton
John, and drawing a blank. This was the late eighties, and one of my recent
looks had involved teaming a pink suit and a straw boater with a scale model
of the Eiffel Tower on top of it, so you couldn’t really blame him. But full of
cokey confidence, I wasn’t deterred. As I continued propelling him out of the
garden, I heard the unmistakable sound of George’s mordant, Scouse-
accented voice calling out to me.

‘Elton,’ he said. ‘I really think you need to go steady on the old marching
powder.’

Bob somehow managed to talk his way out of being dressed in my
clothes, but it didn’t change the fact that one of The Beatles was publicly
telling me to do something about my cocaine habit. I just laughed it off.

This time, however, I didn’t laugh it off. The full force of the Dwight
Family Temper was unleashed. Maybe it hit home harder than before
because, after Indianapolis, I knew for a fact that Hugh was right. The
ensuing row was terrible. I screamed and shouted. I said the most hurtful,
wounding things I could think of to Hugh, the kind of stuff so horrible it
literally comes back to haunt you — you suddenly remember having said it
years later, completely out of the blue, and still clench your teeth and wince.
None of it made any difference. Hugh’s mind was made up. He left for
Arizona that afternoon.

Incredibly, given the way we had parted, Hugh later asked me to visit him
at the treatment centre. Big mistake. I arrived and was gone within twenty
minutes, which was long enough for me to cause a huge scene. I exploded
again — this place was a total shithole, the therapists were a bunch of creeps,
he was being brainwashed, he had to leave at once. When he wouldn’t, I
stormed out and got on a plane back to London.

On arrival, I went straight to my rented house and locked myself in. I

holed up in the bedroom for two weeks, alone, snorting cocaine and drinking
whisky. On the rare occasions when I ate, I made myself sick immediately
afterwards. I was up for days on end, watching porn, taking drugs. I wouldn’t
answer the phone. I wouldn’t answer the door. If anyone knocked, I’d sit for
hours afterwards in complete silence, rigid with paranoia and fear, terrified to
move in case they were still outside, spying on me.

Sometimes I listened to music. I played ‘Don’t Give Up’ by Peter Gabriel
and Kate Bush over and over and over again, crying at the lyrics: ‘no fight
left or so it seems, I am a man whose dreams have all deserted’. Sometimes I
spent whole days writing out pointless lists of records I owned, songs I’d
written, people I would like to work with, football teams I’d seen: anything to
fill the time, to give me a reason to take more drugs, to stop myself going to
sleep. I was supposed to have a Watford board meeting, but I rang them and
told them I was unwell. I didn’t wash, I didn’t get dressed. I sat around,
wanking, in a dressing gown covered in my own puke. It was sordid. Awful.

Sometimes I never wanted to see Hugh again. Sometimes I was desperate
to speak to him, but I couldn’t get hold of him. He had moved into a halfway
house, and after the scene I’d created at the rehab centre, no one would tell
me where he was. Eventually, I made myself so ill that I realized this was it. I
couldn’t take it anymore. If I carried on for a couple more days I genuinely
would be dead: I’d either overdose or have a heart attack. Was that really
what I wanted? I knew it wasn’t. Despite my self-destructive behaviour, I
didn’t actually want to self-destruct. I had no idea how to live, but I didn’t
want to die. I’d managed to track down Hugh’s ex-boyfriend, Barron Segar,
who told me that he was in a halfway house in Prescott, a city four hours
north of Tucson. I called Hugh. He sounded nervous. He said we could meet,
but that there were conditions. I had to speak to his counsellor first. He
wanted to see me, because there were things he wanted to say to me, but he
wouldn’t say them unless I had a counsellor present too. He didn’t spell it
out, but I suspected some kind of intervention was on the cards. I hesitated
for a moment, but I was past convincing myself that, although things were
bad, I was intelligent enough, successful enough and wealthy enough to sort
them out on my own. I was too miserable and too ashamed of myself to even
try. So I agreed: whatever it took.

Robert Key came with me and Connie Pappas met us at the airport in LA.
I phoned Hugh’s counsellor. He told me that the meeting had to form part of
Hugh’s therapy. We would both make a list of things we didn’t like about
each other and read it out. I was terrified, but I did it.

The next day, I was in a tiny hotel room in Prescott, facing Hugh. We sat
so close that our knees were touching, holding our lists. I went first. I said
that I didn’t like the fact that Hugh was untidy. He left his clothes
everywhere. He didn’t put CDs back in their cases after he had played them.
He forgot to turn the lights off after he left a room at night. Stupid, niggly
little irritations, the kind of things that get on your nerves about your partner
every day.

Then it was Hugh’s turn. I noticed that he was shaking. He was more
terrified than me. ‘You’re a drug addict,’ he said. ‘You’re an alcoholic.
You’re a food addict and a bulimic. You’re a sex addict. You’re co-
dependent.’

That was it. There was a long pause. Hugh was still shaking. He couldn’t
look at me. He thought I was going to explode again and storm out.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I am.’

Both Hugh and his counsellor looked at me. ‘Well, do you want to get
help?’ his counsellor asked. ‘Do you want to get better?’

I started to cry. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I need help. I want to get better.’

twelve

Lutheran Hospital,
Park Ridge,
Illinois

10 August 1990

We’ve lived together, you and I, for sixteen years, and boy, have we had some great times. But
now it’s time for me to sit down and tell you how I really feel about you. I loved you so much.
At first, we were inseparable — we seemed to meet so often, either at my house, or at other
people’s. In the end, we were so fond of each other that I decided I couldn’t be without you. I
wanted us to be a great couple and to hell with what other people thought.

When I first met you, you seemed to bring out everything that had been suppressed before. I
could talk about anything I wanted for the first time in my life. There was something in your
make-up that brought all my walls and barriers crashing down. You made me feel free. I was
never jealous if other people shared you. In fact, I liked turning other people on to your charms.
I realize how stupid I must have been, because you never really cared for me. It was all one-
sided. You only care about how many people you can trap in your web.

My body and brain have suffered greatly because of my love for you — you have left me with
permanent physical and mental scars. Remember that romantic saying, ‘I would die for you’?
Well, I nearly did. Still, you’re a hard lady to get rid of. We’ve split so many times before but I
always went back to you. Even though I knew it was a mistake, I still did. When there was no
one else to comfort me, you were only a phone call away at any hour of the day or night. You
never cease to amaze me — I’ve sent cars to pick you up and I even sent planes so that you and I
could spend some hours or days together. And when you finally arrived, I was ecstatic to
embrace you once more.

We had great parties with people. We had great, intense talks about how we were going to
change the world. Of course, we never did, but boy, could we talk! We had sex with people we
barely knew and who we really didn’t give a damn about. I didn’t care who they were as long as
they slept with me. But, in the morning, they were gone, and I was alone again. You had gone
too. Sometimes I wanted you so insatiably, but you had vanished. With you by my side, I was
all-conquering, but with you gone I was just a sad little child again.

My family never liked you at all. In fact, they hated the spell you had me under. You
managed to push me away from them and lots of my friends. I wanted them to understand how I

felt about you, but they never listened, and I would feel anger, and hurt. I felt ashamed because I
cared more about you than I did about my own flesh and blood. All I cared about was myself
and you. So I kept you to myself. In the end, I didn’t want to share you anymore. I just wanted
us to be alone. I became more miserable, because you ruled my life — you were my Svengali.

I guess I'll try and come to the point of this letter. It’s taken me sixteen years to realize that
you’ve taken me nowhere. Whenever I tried to have a relationship with someone else, I always
brought you along at some point. So I have no doubts that it was me who was the user. But I
found no compassion and love — what love I had for anyone was always superficial.

I had grown tired and hateful towards myself, but recently, I met someone again — someone I
loved and trusted, and that person was adamant that this was going to be a two-way love affair,
not a three-way one. He made me realize how self-centred I had become, and he made me think
about my life and my sense of values. My life has ground to a halt. I now have the opportunity
to change my way of living and thinking. I am prepared to accept humility, and therefore have
to say goodbye to you for the final time.

You have been my whore. You have kept me from any sort of spirituality and you have kept
me from finding out who I really am. I don’t want you and I to share the same grave. I want to
die a natural death when I go, at peace with myself. I want to live the rest of my life being
honest and facing the consequences rather than hiding behind my celebrity status. I feel as
though, after sixteen years with you, I was dead anyway.

Once more, white lady — goodbye. If I run into you somewhere — and, let’s face it, you’re
such a woman about town — I’ll ignore you and leave immediately. You’ve seen me enough
over the years and I’m sick of you. You’ve won the fight — I surrender.

Thanks but no thanks,

Elton

eS Re Oo

The moment the words ‘I need help’ came out of my mouth, I felt different. It
was like something had been switched back on inside me, like a pilot light
that had gone out. I somehow knew that I was going to get well. But it wasn’t
as straightforward as that. First of all, they couldn’t find a clinic anywhere in
America that would take me. Almost all of them specialized in treating one
addiction at a time, and I had three: cocaine, alcohol and food. I didn’t want
them treated consecutively, which would have meant spending something
like four months going from one facility to another. I wanted them all treated
at once.

Eventually they found somewhere. When I saw it, I nearly refused to go
in. Hugh’s treatment centre — which, you may remember, I loudly declared to
be a total shithole — was really luxurious. It was set in the countryside outside
Tucson, with incredible views of the Santa Catalina mountains. It had a vast
swimming pool, around which there were yoga classes. Mine was just an

ordinary general hospital: the Lutheran, in a suburb of Chicago called Park
Ridge. It was a big, grey, monolithic building, with mirrored glass windows.
It didn’t seem much like a place that offered yoga classes by the pool. The
only thing it had a view of was a shopping centre car park. But Robert Key
was still with me, and I felt too embarrassed to turn tail. Besides, there was
nowhere else to go. He dropped me in reception, gave me a hug, then went
back to England. I checked in, under the name George King, on 29 July 1990.
They told me I had to share a room, which didn’t go down very well, until I
Saw my room-mate. His name was Greg, he was gay and very attractive. At
least there was something nice to look at around here.

I checked out again six days later. It wasn’t just that it was tough in there,
although it was. I couldn’t sleep: I would lie awake all night, waiting for the
daily alarm call at 6.30 a.m. I had panic attacks. I suffered from mood swings
— not from high to low, but low to even lower, a fog of depression and
anxiety that thickened and thinned but never cleared. I felt ill all the time. I
felt weak. I was lonely. You weren’t allowed to make phone calls or speak to
anyone outside. They allowed me to bend that rule once, when the news
broke on TV that the guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan had been killed in a
helicopter crash. He was on tour with Eric Clapton at the time and his
helicopter was part of a convoy that had taken off, carrying the artists and
their crews. Ray Cooper was in Eric Clapton’s band. The news that was
coming through was confusing — at one point, they incorrectly reported that
Eric had died too — and I had no idea whether Ray was in the helicopter that
had crashed. After a lot of tearful pleading, they let me find out: Ray was
OK.

And, most of all, I was embarrassed. Not because of my addictions, but
because we were expected to do things for ourselves — clean our rooms, make
our beds — and that was something I was completely unused to. I’d allowed
myself to get to the stage where I shaved and I wiped my arse, and paid other
people to do everything else for me. I had no idea how to work a washing
machine. I had to ask another patient, a woman called Peggy, to show me.
After she realized that I wasn’t joking, she was kind and helpful, but that
didn’t change the fact that I was a forty-three-year-old man who didn’t know
how to clean his own clothes. When it came time to spend my $10 a week

allowance on stationery or chewing gum, I realized I had no idea how much
things cost. It was years since I’d done any shopping myself that didn’t
involve an auction house or a high-end designer boutique. It was shameful:
the completely unnecessary bubble that fame and wealth lets you build up
around yourself, if you’re stupid enough to allow it. I see it all the time now,
especially with rappers: they tur up everywhere with huge, pointless
entourages, far bigger than the one I saw around Elvis that so shocked me at
the time. They’re often doing it out of a spirit of charity — they’re giving a job
to their friends from back home, when back home is somewhere no one
would want to be — but it’s a dangerous thing to do. You think you’re
surrounding yourself with people and making your life easier. But in reality
you’re just isolating yourself from the real world, and, in my experience at
least, the more isolated you are from reality — the more removed you become
from the person you’re naturally supposed to be — the harder you’re making
your life and the less happy you become. You end up with something like a
medieval court, with you as the monarch and everyone around you jockeying
for position, scared of losing their place in the pecking order and fighting
each other to see who can be closest to you, who can exert the most influence
on you. It’s a grotesque, soul-destroying environment to live in. And you’ve
created it yourself.

But the real problem was that the treatment was based around the
Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme, and as soon as my counsellor
started talking to me about God, I flipped out. I didn’t want to know about
religion: religion was dogma, it was bigotry, it was the Moral Majority and
people like Jerry Falwell saying that AIDS was God’s judgement on
homosexuals. It’s a stumbling block for a lot of people. Years later, when I
tried to convince George Michael to go into rehab, he dismissed it out of
hand for the same reason: ‘I don’t want to know about God, I don’t want to
join some cult.’ I tried to explain that I had thought exactly the same thing
too, but that just made things worse: he thought I was being patronizing and
smug. But I really had been there too. That afternoon in Chicago, I stormed
out of the meeting, went back to my room, packed my bag and left.

I got as far as the pavement outside. I sat down on a bench with my
suitcase and burst into tears. I could easily make some phone calls and get out

of here, but where was I going to go? Back to London? To do what? Sit
around in a dressing gown covered in puke, doing coke and watching porn all
day? It wasn’t a very appealing prospect. I lugged my suitcase sheepishly
back into the hospital. A couple of days later, I nearly walked out again. My
counsellor suggested that I wasn’t taking rehab seriously: ‘“You’re not
working hard enough, you’re just here for the ride.’ I really lost my temper. I
told him that if I hadn’t been taking rehab seriously, I would have left long
ago. I said he was picking on me because I was famous. He dismissed my
arguments — it was like he wasn’t listening. So I called him a cunt. That
seemed to get his attention. I was hauled up before a disciplinary board and
warned about my language and behaviour.

But it was also agreed I would get a different counsellor, a woman called
Debbie, who seemed less concerned about making an example of me because
of who I was, and I started to make progress. I liked the routine. I liked doing
things for myself. I got to grips, if not with the idea of God, then of a higher
power. It made sense. I only had to look at my life, all the moments where
instinct, or fate, had driven me along: everything from Ray Williams putting
me in touch with Bernie almost as an afterthought, to the fact that I’d picked
up that magazine with Ryan White’s story in it in the doctor’s waiting room,
to the decision to clear out the contents of Woodside, which was starting to
look less and less like a rash impulse and more and more like a premonition
that my life was about to change. I started to embrace the AA meetings. After
a while I was allowed visitors: Billie Jean King and her partner Ilana Kloss
came to see me, so did Bernie and my friends Johnny and Eddi Barbis. I had
to write all the time, including a farewell letter to cocaine — which Bernie
read when he visited and broke down in tears — and a list of consequences of
my drug and alcohol abuse. It was hard at first, but once I got started, I
couldn’t stop. When I’d arrived at the hospital, a consultant had asked me
how I was feeling, and I told him the truth: I didn’t know, I wasn’t sure if I’d
had any real feelings for years, or whether everything was the result of the
constant see-sawing of emotions brought on by taking drugs and booze. Now,
though, it all came gushing out. The list of consequences went on and on for
three pages. Self-hatred. Severe depression. Going onstage under the
influence of drugs.

It was cathartic, but the group meetings would throw my problems into
sharp relief. There were people there who had undergone the most horrifying
things. At one, we were told to talk about our worst, dirtiest secret. I talked a
little about my past relationships, about my unerring ability to take over other
people’s lives for my own selfish, deluded reasons. Then it was the turn of a
girl from somewhere in the Deep South of America, who was there for help
with food addiction. It took her forty-five minutes to tell her story — at first
because she was sobbing so hard she couldn’t get the words out and
eventually because she was struggling to make herself heard over the sound
of everyone else crying. She had grown up being abused by her father. When
she was a teenager, she had become pregnant. She was too scared to tell
anyone, so she ate more and more in order to put weight on to disguise her
pregnancy. In the end she had delivered the baby herself, frightened and
alone.

So the meetings were no place for the faint-hearted, but I grew to love
them. They forced me to be honest, after years of deceiving other people and
myself. If someone else has the guts to stand there and tell you about being
abused by their own father, it compels you to step up and tell the truth about
yourself — it’s just insulting their bravery to do anything else. When you’re an
addict, it’s all about lying, covering your tracks, telling yourself you don’t
have a problem, telling other people you can’t do something because you’re
ill, when in reality you’re just wasted or hungover. Being honest was hard,
but it was freeing. You got rid of all the baggage that came with lying: the
embarrassment, the shame.

Whenever someone had tried to help before, my standard way of
dismissing their concern was to say that they didn’t understand; they weren’t
Elton John, how could they possibly know what it was like being me? But it
quickly became apparent that the other addicts in the meetings did
understand. They understood only too well. At one meeting, everyone was
asked to write down what they liked and didn’t like about me. They made
two lists on a board — my good points and my bad points. I started talking
about what had been said, turning it over and over, calmly accepting the
criticisms. I thought I was doing well, but after a while, someone stopped me,
and pointed out that I had gone on and on about the negative comments, but

never mentioned any of the positive ones. They said that was a sign of low
self-esteem. I realized they were right. Perhaps that’s why I loved performing
so much. You find it hard to accept personal compliments, so your life
becomes about finding a more impersonal alternative: chart placings, crowds
of nameless faces applauding. No wonder I always claimed my problems
melted away onstage. No wonder my life offstage had become such a mess. I
went back to my room and wrote IAM WORTHY, I AM A GOOD PERSON
on the blue folder I kept my writing in. It was a start.

After six weeks, I was ready to leave. I flew back to London where I
called in at the Rocket office and told everyone I was taking some time off.
No gigs, no new songs, no recording sessions for at least a year, maybe
eighteen months. That was unheard of — I hadn’t taken more than a few
weeks off a year since 1965 — but everyone accepted it. The only thing I
would do was honour an unbreakable commitment to a short private charity
show with Ray Cooper at the Grosvenor House hotel, which was terrifying,
but we got through it. While I was there, I saw the artwork for a career-
spanning box set I had planned before going into rehab and asked for it to be
changed. I liked the title, To Be Continued ... — it seemed positive and
hopeful, even prescient, given that I’d chosen it before I cleaned up. But I
wanted it to feature a current photo, rather than a collection of old shots from
the seventies and eighties; that way, the title seemed like a comment on my
life now, rather than on my past. And that was the only work I did for the
next year, unless you count unexpectedly turning up onstage in full drag at
one of Rod Stewart’s Wembley Arena gigs and sitting on his lap while he
tried to sing ‘You’re In My Heart’. And I don’t: spoiling things for Rod has
never felt like work, more a thoroughly enjoyable hobby.

I spent some time in Atlanta with Hugh, but our relationship began to
peter out. Both our counsellors had warned against us staying together: they
kept telling us that it wouldn’t work, that the dynamic of the relationship
would change irrevocably now that we were sober. We both dismissed that as
nonsense: half the writing I’d done in rehab had been about how much I
loved Hugh, how much I missed him. So we rented an apartment, moved in
together and discovered to our immense surprise that the dynamic of our
relationship appeared to have changed irrevocably now that we were sober,

and it wasn’t working out. It wasn’t a horrible split, we weren’t screaming
and shouting at each other, but it was sad. We had been through a lot
together, but it was time for us both to move on.

So for most of the next eighteen months I was in London, where I settled
into a quiet routine. I bought the house I’d been renting, where I had holed up
on my final binge. I lived alone. I didn’t bother with employing staff; I liked
doing things myself. I bought myself a Mini and I got a dog from Battersea
Dogs Home, a little mutt called Thomas. Every day, I would get up at 6.30
a.m. and take Thomas for a walk. I adored it. It’s a real recovering addict’s
cliché to say that you notice things about your surroundings that you never
saw while you were using — oh, the beauty of the flowers, the wonders of
nature, all that crap — but it’s only a cliché because it’s true. I’m sure that’s
one of the reasons why I started collecting photography when I got sober. I’d
been around incredible photographers for most of my career — Terry O’ Neill,
Annie Leibovitz, Richard Avedon, Norman Parkinson — but I just thought of
it as a form of publicity, never an art, until I stopped drinking and using
drugs. I went to the south of France for a holiday and visited a friend of mine,
Alain Perrin, who lived outside Cahors. He was looking through black and
white fashion photographs with a view to buying some. Idly peering over his
shoulder, I was suddenly transfixed. They were by Irving Penn, Horst and
Herb Ritts. I knew Herb Ritts — he’d taken the photo for the cover of Sleeping
with the Past — but it felt like I was seeing his work in a completely new way.
I loved everything about the photos Alain was looking at — the lighting, the
shapes it had created and contorted; it all seemed extraordinary. I ended up
buying twelve of them, and that was the start of an obsession that’s never
stopped: photography is the love of my life in terms of visual art.

But I first felt that change in how I saw things walking around London. A
hot summer had turned into a mild autumn. It was lovely being up and out
early in the cool sunshine, walking Thomas around Holland Park or the
grounds of St James’s church, watching the leaves gradually turn. Previously
I had only ever been up at that time of the morning if I was still awake from
the night before.

After the dog was walked, I would get in my Mini and drive to see a
psychiatrist. I’d never visited one before, and it turned out to involve a steep

learning curve. Some of the psychiatrists I’ve seen over the years have been
great; they really helped me get an understanding of myself. And some of
them turned into a bit of a nightmare: more interested in my celebrity and
what associating with me could do for them. One of them was even struck off
for molesting his patients — the female ones, I should add, lest anyone think I
was among his victims.

I spent most of my time at meetings. I had left Chicago with strict
instructions from my sponsor to go to an AA meeting the moment I cleared
customs in London. Starved of football after weeks in America, I went to see
a Watford game instead. That night, my sponsor rang. When I told him what
I’d done, he yelled at me. A man who worked as a driver for the city of
Chicago’s sanitation department and spent most of his life communicating
with his colleagues over the noise of his garbage truck, he could really yell.
That night, he sounded like he was trying to make himself heard on the other
side of the Atlantic without the aid of a telephone. More used to shouting at
people than being shouted at, I was taken aback, but I was also abashed. He
was a good man — I eventually ended up being his son’s godfather — but he
was genuinely angry, and his anger was born out of concern for me.

So I followed his advice. I became very strict about attending meetings:
Alcoholics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Anorexics and Bulimics
Anonymous. I went to meetings in Pimlico, on Shaftesbury Avenue, in
Marylebone, on Portobello Road. Sometimes I went to three or four meetings
a day. I went to a hundred in a month. Some of my friends began expressing
the opinion that I was now addicted to going to meetings about addiction.
They were probably right, but it was a substantial improvement on the things
I’d been addicted to previously. Perhaps there was a meeting I could attend to
deal with it.

At the very first meeting I went to, a photographer leapt out and got a shot
of me leaving. Someone must have recognized me there and tipped them off,
which was obviously against the rules. It was on the front page of the Sun the
next day: ELTON IN ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. As, this time, they
neglected to suggest that I attended in leather shorts or twirling a dildo, I let it
pass. I didn’t mind who knew. I was taking a positive step. I kept going to the
meetings because I enjoyed them. I liked the people I met. I always

volunteered to make the tea, and I made lasting friends, people I’m still in
touch with today: ordinary people, who saw me as a recovering addict first
and Elton John second. In a weird way, the meetings reminded me of being at
Watford FC — there was no special treatment laid on for me, and there was
that same sense of people pulling together towards the same goal. You heard
the most extraordinary things. Women in the Anorexics and Bulimics
meetings would talk about taking a single pea, cutting it into four and eating a
quarter for lunch and a quarter for dinner. I would think, ‘that’s insane’, but
then I would remember how I’d been a few months before — unwashed and
pissed out of my mind at 10 a.m., literally doing a line of coke every five
minutes — and realized they must have thought exactly the same about me.

Not everything that happened in the months after I got sober was
wonderful. My father died at the end of 1991: he had never really recovered
from the heart bypass operation eight years before. I didn’t go to his funeral.
It would have seemed hypocritical, plus the press would have turned up en
masse and the whole thing would have become a circus. My father didn’t
share in my fame, so why inflict the effects of it on him at the end? Besides,
I’d already done enough mourning for my relationship with my dad, and I’d
reached a peace, of sorts: I wished that things had been different, but it was
what it was. Sometimes you have to look at the hand you’ve been dealt and
throw in the cards.

And then there was Freddie Mercury. He hadn’t told me he was ill — I’d
just found out, through mutual friends. I visited him a lot when he was dying,
although I could never stay for much longer than an hour. It was too upsetting
— | didn’t think he wanted me to see him like that. Someone so vibrant and so
necessary, someone that would have just got better with age and gone from
strength to strength, dying in such a horrible, arbitrary way. A year later, they
could have kept him alive with antiretroviral drugs. Instead, there was
nothing they could do for him. He was too frail to get out of bed, he was
losing his sight, his body was covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, and yet
he was still definitely Freddie, gossiping away, completely outrageous: ‘Have
you heard Mrs Bowie’s new record, dear? What does she think she’s doing?’
He lay there, surrounded by catalogues of Japanese furniture and _ art,
interrupting the conversation to telephone auction houses in order to bid for

items he liked the look of: ‘Darling, I’ve just bought this, isn’t it wonderful?’
I couldn’t work out whether he didn’t realize how close to death he was, or if
he knew perfectly well but was determined not to let what was happening to
him stop him being himself. Either way, I thought it was incredible.

Eventually he made the decision to stop taking any medication other than
painkillers, and died at the end of November 1991. On Christmas Day, Tony
arrived at my front door, carrying something in a pillowcase. I opened it up
and it was a watercolour by an artist whose work I collected called Henry
Scott Tuke, an Impressionist who painted male nudes. There was a note with
it: ‘Darling Sharon — thought you’d love this. Love, Melina.’ While he was
lying there, he’d spotted it in one of his auction catalogues and bought it for
me. He was thinking about Christmas presents for a Christmas he must have
known in his heart he wouldn’t see; thinking about other people when he was
really too ill to think of anyone but himself. Like I said before: Freddie was
magnificent.

Some people really struggle when they come out of addiction into
sobriety, but I was the opposite. I was elated. I never really wanted to use
again; I was just happy waking up every morning without feeling like shit.
Bizarrely, I would dream about cocaine all the time. I still do, almost every
week, and it’s been twenty-eight years since I last did a line. It’s always the
same dream: I’m snorting coke when I hear someone coming into the room,
usually my mother. Then I try to hide what I’m doing, but I spill it and it goes
everywhere — all over the floor, all over me. But it never made me hanker
after cocaine. Quite the opposite. When I wake up, I can almost feel the
numbing sensation of the coke sliding down the back of my throat — always
the part of doing it that I hated — and I just think ‘thank God that’s over’. I
sometimes wish I could have a glass of wine with my dinner, or a beer with
friends, but I know I can’t. I don’t mind people drinking around me at all: it’s
my problem, not theirs. But I never feel like having a line, and I can’t bear
being anywhere near people who are doing it. The second I walk into a room,
I know. I can just sense people are on it. The way they’re talking — their
voices pitched slightly louder than they need to be, not really listening — and
how they’re behaving. I just leave. I don’t want to do cocaine, and I don’t
want to be around people who are doing it, because, quite frankly, it’s a drug

that makes people act like arseholes. I wish I’d realized that forty-five years
ago.

Every time I went to a foreign country to play live, I found out where the
AA or NA meeting was and went there as soon as I landed. I went to
meetings in Argentina, France, Spain. I went to meetings in Los Angeles and
New York. And I went to meetings in Atlanta. Even though I’d broken up
with Hugh, I was still in love with the city. I’?d met a great circle of friends
through Hugh, people from outside the music business, whose company I
enjoyed. It was a great music town — there was a big soul and hip-hop scene —
but it was strangely relaxed; I could go to the cinema or the shopping mall on
Peachtree Road and no one would bother me.

I was spending so much time there that I eventually decided to buy an
apartment, a thirty-sixth-floor duplex. The views were beautiful, and so, I
couldn’t help noticing, was the real-estate agent who sold it to me. He was
called John Scott. I asked him out, and we became a couple.

Eventually, I stopped going to meetings. I had gone virtually every day
for three years — something crazy like 1,400 meetings — but I’d finally
decided that they had done all they could for me. I got to a point where I
didn’t want to talk about alcohol or cocaine or bulimia every day. I suppose
because I was a high-profile addict who turned his life around very publicly, I
became someone that my peers looked to if they had a problem. It’s become a
bit of a running joke — Elton always springing into action whenever a pop star
has an issue with drink or drugs — but I don’t mind at all. If someone is in a
state and needs help, I call them, or leave my number with their manager, just
saying, ‘Listen, I’ve been there, I know what it’s like.’ If they need to contact
me, they can. Some of those people everyone knows about. I got Rufus
Wainwright into rehab — he was taking so much crystal meth that, at one
stage, he’d gone temporarily blind — and I’m Eminem’s AA sponsor.
Whenever I ring to check in on him, he always greets me the same way:
‘Hello, you cunt’, which I guess is very Eminem. And some of them no one
knows about, and I’m not going to spill the beans now: they wanted to keep
their problems private, and that’s fine. Either way, it’s incredibly rewarding.
Helping people to get sober is a wonderful thing.

But some people you can’t help. It’s a horrible feeling. You end up just

looking on from the sidelines, knowing what’s going to happen, knowing that
there’s only one way their story’s going to end. It was like that with Whitney
Houston — her aunt, Dionne Warwick, asked me to call her, but either the
messages I left didn’t get through, or she didn’t want to know. And George
Michael really didn’t want to know. I nagged at him because I was worried
and because mutual friends kept contacting me, asking if I could do
something. He wrote an open letter to Heat magazine, most of which was
concerned with telling me, at considerable length, to fuck off and mind my
own business. I wish we hadn’t fallen out. But more than that, I wish he was
still alive. I loved George. He was ludicrously talented, and he went through
a lot, but he was the sweetest, kindest, most generous man. I miss him so
much.

George was one of the first people I performed with after I got sober. As
much as I enjoyed my time off, I knew it couldn’t last forever and I didn’t
want it to last forever — I wanted to get back to work, even if getting back to
work felt daunting. I’d started thinking about playing live again, and to test
the water a little, I agreed to appear onstage at one of George’s gigs. He was
doing a run of shows at Wembley Arena. This time, I didn’t turn up in a
Ronald McDonald costume or drive a Reliant Robin. I dressed down in a
baseball cap and we sang ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ together, as
we had at Live Aid six years before, in 1985. It felt great. The audience went
insane when my name was announced, and when the duet was released as a
single, it went to Number One on both sides of the Atlantic. I booked a studio
in Paris and tentatively suggested recording a new album, which ended up
being called The One.

The first day there, I managed twenty minutes before leaving in a panic. I
can’t remember now what the problem was. I suppose I thought I couldn’t
make an album without drink or drugs, which made no sense whatsoever.
You only had to listen to Leather Jackets to realize that the opposite was true:
it was pretty compelling evidence that I couldn’t make an album while taking
drugs. I went back the next day, and I gradually settled into things. The only
real problem came with a track called ‘The Last Song’. Bernie’s lyrics were
about a man dying of AIDS being reconciled with his estranged father, who
had excommunicated him when he found out he was gay. They were

beautiful, but I just couldn’t cope with singing them. It was just after
Freddie’s death. Somewhere in Virginia, I knew Vance Buck was dying, too.
Every time I tried to get the vocal down, I started crying. Eventually I
managed it and ‘The Last Song’ was subsequently used as the finale of And
the Band Played On, a docudrama about the discovery of, and the fight
against, HIV. They played it over a montage of images of prominent AIDS
victims. Half of them were people I knew personally: Ryan; Freddie; Steve
Rubell, the owner of Studio 54.

By then, I had started the Elton John AIDS Foundation. I had kept doing
charity work, but the more I did, the more I realized I needed to do. The thing
that shook me the most was volunteering for a charity called Operation Open
Hand that delivered meals to AIDS patients all over Atlanta. I did it together
with my new boyfriend John. At some houses we delivered to, the person
inside would only open the door a crack when we knocked. They were
covered in lesions and didn’t want to be seen, because the stigma attached to
AIDS was so great. Sometimes they wouldn’t open the door at all. You
would leave the meal on the step, and as you walked away you would hear
the door open, the meal would be snatched in and the door would slam shut
again. These people were dying horribly, but worse, it seemed as if they were
dying in shame, alone, cut off from the world. It was horrendous, like
something you read about happening in the Middle Ages — sick people being
cast out of society because of fear and ignorance — but it was happening in
the 1990s, in America.

I couldn’t get it out of my head. Eventually, I asked John if he would help
me start a charity of our own, concentrating on helping people protect
themselves from HIV, and on the basic things that people with HIV needed to
live a better, more dignified life: simple stuff like food, lodging,
transportation, access to doctors and counsellors. For two years, John ran it
from his kitchen table in Atlanta. Virginia Banks, who worked on my team in
LA, became the secretary. There was a staff of four, including me. We didn’t
have any experience, we didn’t know anything about infrastructure, but I did
know that we had to keep overheads down. I’d seen too many charity
foundations, especially celebrity ones, wasting money. You’d turn up to a
fundraiser and everyone would have been flown in and chauffeured around at

the charity’s expense. Even now, nearly thirty years later, our overheads are
minimal. We put on some pretty glitzy events, but they’re all sponsored. The
charity doesn’t pay a thing towards them.

I really threw myself into the AIDS Foundation. In rehab, my counsellor
had asked me what I was going to do with the spare time and energy I would
have now I was sober, time and energy that had previously been consumed
by taking drugs or recovering from taking them. They called it the hole in the
doughnut and they wanted to know how I planned to fill it. I talked wildly
about my grand plans — I would learn to speak Italian and to cook. Of course,
neither of those things happened. I suppose the AIDS Foundation was the
thing that filled the hole in the doughnut — it gave me a new sense of purpose
outside of music. I was determined that it was going to work: so determined,
I auctioned off my record collection to raise funds to get it started. There
were 46,000 singles, 20,000 albums, even the old 78s with ‘Reg Dwight’
proudly written on the sleeves in biro. It went in one lot, for $270,000 to an
anonymous bidder. I talked anyone I thought could help into getting
involved: businessmen who could show us how to run things as efficiently as
possible; people who worked at my record label; Robert Key from Rocket;
Howard Rose, the agent who’d steered my live career from the moment I first
turned up in America.

I tapped friends for ideas. Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss came up with
Smash Hits, an annual fundraising tennis tournament that’s been running
since 1993: tennis stars were really keen to get involved because of Arthur
Ashe’s death. Competitive as ever, I often took part myself, although the
most famous thing I’ve done on a tennis court remains falling flat on my arse
while trying to sit in a director’s chair courtside at the Royal Albert Hall.
Another breakthrough was the Academy Awards Viewing Party. It was
effectively given to us by a guy called Patrick Lippert, a political activist who
founded Rock the Vote. He always held a fundraising Oscars party for one of
his causes, but after being diagnosed with HIV, he decided to turn the event
into an AIDS foundation fundraiser, and asked if we wanted to be involved.
The first party was held in 1993 at Maple Drive, the restaurant owned by
Dudley Moore. There were 140 people there — that’s all the restaurant held —
and we raised $350,000, which seemed like an enormous amount of money at

the time. The next year we did it again, and more stars turned out: I ended up
sitting in a booth with Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen and his wife Patti,
Emma Thompson and Prince. But Patrick wasn’t there. He died of AIDS
three months after the first party, aged thirty-five. Like Freddie Mercury, he
just missed out on the antiretroviral drugs that could have saved his life.

Since then, the Elton John AIDS Foundation has raised over $450 million,
and we’ve hosted some incredible events. The last time Aretha Franklin
performed live was at our twenty-fifth anniversary gala, at the Cathedral of St
John the Divine in New York. She had been supposed to play the previous
year, but had to pull out as she was too sick. She was dying of cancer, and
had announced her retirement, but she made an exception for us. When she
arrived, I was shocked: I wasn’t prepared for how thin and frail and unwell
she looked. Backstage, I found myself asking her if she wanted to sing. I
suppose I was really asking whether she was well enough to sing. She just
smiled and nodded and said, ‘I would never let you down again.’ I think she
must have known that this was the last time she would perform, and she liked
the fact that it was for the charity and that the gala was in a church, where her
singing career had begun. She sang ‘I Say A Little Prayer’ and ‘Bridge Over
Troubled Water’ and she tore the roof off. However sick she was, it hadn’t
affected her voice — she sounded astonishing. I stood at the front of the stage
watching the greatest singer in the world sing for the final time, crying my
eyes out.

The AIDS Foundation has given me experiences I would never otherwise
have had and taken me to places I would never have visited. I’ve had to speak
before Congress several times — asking for the US government to increase
AIDS funding — which strangely wasn’t quite as nerve-racking as I expected.
Compared to trying to convince Watford Borough Council’s planning
committee to let us build a new football stadium, it was a walk in the park. I
thought I would get a hostile audience from the more right-wing, religiously
zealous Republicans, but no: once again, compared to some members of
Watford Borough Council’s planning committee, they were the absolute
model of open-mindedness, flexibility and sweet reason.

And, unexpectedly, working with the AIDS Foundation would indirectly
lead to the most profound and important change that’s ever taken place in my

life. But we’ll come to that later.

thirteen

I don’t want to sound mystical — or even worse, smug — but it was sometimes
hard to escape the feeling that life was patting me on the back for getting
sober. The One became my biggest-selling album worldwide since 1975.
After two years, the renovations at Woodside were finished and I moved back
in. I loved it. It finally looked like somewhere a normal human being might
live, rather than a coked-up rock star’s preposterous country pile. Ten years
after we’d last written a song together, Tim Rice phoned up out of the blue,
asking me if I was interested in working with him again. Apparently Disney
were making their first animated film based on an original story rather than
an existing work, and Tim wanted me involved. I was intrigued. I’d written a
movie soundtrack before, for Friends, a 1971 film that got some pretty hair-
raising reviews — I remember Roger Ebert calling it ‘a sickening piece of
corrupt slop’, but not all the critics enjoyed it as much as that. I’d given
soundtracks a wide berth ever since, but this was clearly something different.
The songs had to tell a story. The plan was that we wouldn’t write the usual
Broadway-style Disney score, but try and come up with pop songs that kids
would like.

It was a strange process. Tim wrote the same way as Bernie, lyrics first,
so that was fine. In fact, writing a musical was like writing the Captain
Fantastic album, because there was a storyline: there was a specific sequence
that you had to follow; you always knew in advance which order the songs
had to go in. But I would be lying if I said I never had doubts about the
project or, rather, my place within it. I have many flaws, but being an artist
who takes himself too seriously is something you could never accuse me of.

Even so, there were days when I’d find myself sat at the piano, thinking long
and hard about the path my career seemed to be taking. You know, I wrote
‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’. I wrote ‘Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest
Word’. I wrote ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues’. And there was
no getting around the fact that I was now writing a song about a warthog that
farted a lot. Admittedly, I thought it was a pretty good song about a warthog
who farted a lot: at the risk of appearing big-headed, I’m pretty sure that in a
list of the greatest songs ever written about warthogs who fart a lot, mine
would come in somewhere near the top. Still, it felt a long way from The
Band turning up backstage and demanding to hear my new album, or Bob
Dylan stopping us on the stairs and complimenting Bernie on ‘My Father’s
Gun’. But I decided that something about the sheer ridiculousness of the
situation appealed to me, and carried on.

It was the right decision. I thought the finished film was completely
extraordinary. I’m not the kind of artist who invites people over to play them
my new album, but I loved The Lion King so much that I arranged a couple of
private screenings so friends could see it. I was incredibly proud of the whole
thing; I knew we were on to something very special. Even so, I couldn’t have
predicted that it would become one of the highest-grossing films of all time.
It introduced my music to a completely new audience. ‘Can You Feel The
Love Tonight?’ won an Oscar for Best Original Song: three of the five
nominations in that category had come from The Lion King: one of them was
‘Hakuna Matata’, the song about the farting warthog. The soundtrack sold
eighteen million copies — more than any album I’ve ever released except my
first Greatest Hits collection. As an added bonus, it kept Voodoo Lounge by
The Rolling Stones off the number one spot in America all through the
summer of 1994. I tried not to be too delighted when I heard that Keith
Richards was furious, grumbling about being ‘beaten by some fuckin’
cartoon’.

Then it was announced that they were turning it into a stage musical, for
which Tim and I were asked to come up with more songs. Once more
demonstrating my uncanny ability to predict exactly what isn’t going to
happen, I kept telling people that turning an animated film into a stage show
was both impossible and doomed to failure — I couldn’t see it at all.

But the director, Julie Taymor, did an amazing job. It opened to rave
reviews, was nominated for eleven Tony Awards, won six, and became the
most successful theatrical production in the history of Broadway. The whole
thing looked astonishing — the sheer ingenuity they had used in staging it was
breathtaking, but I still found the experience of actually sitting through it
oddly awkward. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the show itself. It was
just that I was used to making albums where I had the last word, or to being
completely in charge of my live shows. Here was something I’d helped
create, and yet once it was onstage, it was unfolding completely out of my
control. The arrangements were different from the way I had recorded the
songs, and so were the vocals. In musical theatre, every word has to be
clearly enunciated, it’s a completely different way of singing to anything a
rock or pop artist does. It was a totally new experience for me:
simultaneously amazing and slightly unnerving. I was completely outside of
my comfort zone, which, it slowly dawned on me, was an extremely good
place for an artist to suddenly find himself, forty years into his career.

Disney were absolutely overjoyed with The Lion King’s success — so
overjoyed, they came to me with a deal. It was for a ridiculous amount of
money. They wanted me to develop more films, do TV shows and books;
there was even some talk about a theme park, which boggled the mind a little.
There was just one problem. I’d agreed to make another film with Jeffrey
Katzenberg, who had been chairman of Disney when The Lion King was
made but then left a few months after the film was released and set up
DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. But he didn’t just
exit: his leaving prompted one of the great Hollywood wars between studio
executives, so epic that people have literally written books about it. The
Disney deal was exclusive: it was particularly exclusive of anything
involving Jeffrey, who was now suing them for breach of contract and $250
million, which he eventually got. There wasn’t anything in writing with
Jeffrey, but I’d given him my word — he was one of the people who had
brought me in to The Lion King in the first place. So I regretfully turned
Disney’s deal down. At least the world was spared an Elton John theme park.

But while my world still seemed to be full of new ideas and opportunities,
the one thing sobriety hadn’t helped at all was my love life. My relationship

with John Scott had petered out some time before, and since then: nothing. I
tried not to think about how long it was since I’d last had sex, in case the
sound of me howling in anguish frightened the staff at Woodside.

I realized that I didn’t really know any available gay men. When I got
sober, I stopped going to the kinds of places I might meet them. I didn’t think
I’d be tempted to have a vodka martini if I went to a club or a bar, but there
didn’t seem any point in testing this theory. And besides, even before I’d
gone into rehab, I’d begun thinking I was getting a bit old for that sort of
thing. I’m sure the music at Boy would have sounded as wonderful as ever,
but there does come a point where, in that environment, you start to feel like
the dowager duchess at the debutantes’ ball, peering down your pince-nez at
the latest arrivals.

It all came to a head one Saturday afternoon, when I was rattling around
the house feeling thoroughly sorry for myself. I had one eye on the football,
where Watford were doggedly trying to make my mood worse by getting
hammered 4—1 away at West Brom. I was contemplating another thrilling
evening in front of the TV when I came up with an idea. I rang a friend in
London and explained my predicament. I asked if he could round some
people up and invite them to come to dinner that evening. It was short notice,
but I’d send a car to London for them. As I said it, I realized that it all
sounded a bit pathetic, but I was desperate to meet some gay men who
weren’t in Alcoholics Anonymous. I wasn’t even looking for sex, I was just
lonely.

They turned up around seven: my friend and four guys he’d roped in.
They said they had to leave early to get to a Halloween party back in London,
but I didn’t care. Everyone who had come along seemed really nice. They
were funny and chatty. We ate spaghetti bolognese and had a great laugh —
I’d almost forgotten what it was like to have a conversation that didn’t
revolve around either my career or sobriety. The only one who didn’t seem
terribly pleased to be there was a Canadian guy in a tartan Armani waistcoat
called David. He was clearly shy and didn’t say much, which I thought was a
shame: he was very good-looking. I later discovered that he’d heard a lot of
gossip on the London gay scene about the inadvisability of having anything
whatsoever to do with Elton John, unless you had a burning desire to be

showered with gifts, forced to put your life on hold in order to be whisked
away on tour, then summarily dumped — usually by his personal assistant —
when he met someone else, or lost his temper with you during a post-cocaine
comedown, or announced he was getting married to a woman. | should have
been outraged, but, taking into account my past behaviour, the gossips of the
London gay scene had a point.

Eventually, he volunteered the information that he was interested in film
and photography, which got the conversation going. I offered to give him a
tour of the house and show him my collection of photographs. The more I
talked to him, the more I liked him. He was quiet but self-assured. He was
obviously very smart. He said he was from Toronto but had moved to
London a few years before. He lived in Clapham and worked for the
advertising company Ogilvy and Mather in Canary Wharf — at thirty-one, he
was one of their youngest board directors. I thought I could sense something
resonating between us, a flicker of chemistry. But I tried to put it out of my
mind. The new, improved, sober Elton John wasn’t going to decide he’d
fallen madly in love with someone within minutes of meeting them.

Still, when it came time for them to leave, I asked for his number in what
I thought was a casual way, suggestive merely of further stimulating
conversations about our shared interest in photography somewhere down the
line. He wrote his full name down — David Furnish — handed it over and off
they went.

The next morning found me pacing around the house, trying to work out
what was the earliest you could call someone who’d been out the previous
night at a Halloween party, without looking like the kind of person they’d
eventually have to get a restraining order out against. I decided eleven thirty
was reasonable. David picked up. He sounded tired, but not entirely surprised
to hear from me. It transpired that my casual request for his number hadn’t
looked quite as casual as I thought. Judging by the reaction of his friends,
who’d spent the entire journey back to London mercilessly teasing him and
singing the chorus of ‘Daniel’ at him, I might as well have dropped to my
knees, tearfully grabbed his ankles and refused to let go until he handed it
over. I asked if he wanted to meet up again, and he did. I asked what he was
doing that evening, when I just happened to be in London. I behaved as if this

was a remarkable coincidence, but frankly, if David had been in Botswana, I
suspect I would have happened to be there that evening too: ‘The Kalahari
Desert? What a stroke of luck! I’ve got a meeting there tomorrow morning!’ I
suggested he come over to the house in Holland Park, and I would order a
Chinese takeaway.

I put down the phone, told my driver that my plans for the day had
changed and we were going to London immediately. I rang the most famous
Chinese restaurant I could think of, Mr Chow in Knightsbridge, and asked if
they did deliveries. Then I realized I didn’t know what kind of food he liked,
so I played it safe and ordered an immense selection from the menu.

David looked a bit startled when the Chinese takeaway arrived, or rather
didn’t stop arriving — by the time they’d finished delivering all the boxes, the
place looked like the squash court at Woodside before I had the auction — but
other than that, our first date went incredibly well. No, I definitely wasn’t
imagining it, there really was something resonating between us. It wasn’t just
a physical attraction; our personalities clicked. Once we started talking, we
didn’t stop.

But David had some reservations about us getting involved. For one
thing, he wasn’t keen on the idea of being seen as Elton John’s Latest
Boyfriend, with all the attention that would bring. He had his own life, a
career, and didn’t like his independence being turned upside down because of
who he was seeing. And for another, he was only half out of the closet. His
friends in London knew he was gay, but his family didn’t, and nor did his
workmates, and he didn’t want them to find out via a paparazzi photo in a
tabloid.

So for the first few months our relationship was very quiet and discreet:
we were, to use an old-fashioned phrase, courting. We mostly based
ourselves at the house in Holland Park. Every week-day morning, David
would get up and go to work in Canary Wharf, and I would head off to the
studio or to do promotion for the album of duets I’d just released. I made a
video for the version of ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ I’d recorded with
RuPaul: for once, I actually looked happy while I was making a video. I was
happy. There was something about the relationship that I couldn’t quite put
my finger on. Then I realized what it was. For the first time in my life, I was

in a completely normal relationship, that felt equal, that had nothing to do
with my career or the fact that I was Elton John.

Each Saturday, we would send each other a card, to commemorate the
fact that we had met on a Saturday, and — if you’ve eaten recently, you may
want to skip to the next sentence in case you become nauseous — listen to
Tony! Toni! Toné!’s ‘It’s Our Anniversary’. There were a lot of cosy dinners
and clandestine weekends away. If I called him at work, I had to use a false
name — George King, the pseudonym I’d used when I booked into rehab. I
thought it was terribly romantic. A secret love! The only kind of secret love
I’d had before was the kind you have to keep secret because the other person
clearly isn’t interested in you.

But much as I adored the idea of a secret romance, I was pretty hopeless
at the practicalities of it. It quickly became apparent that after twenty-five
years of earning a living by being as extravagant and OTT as possible, my
notion of keeping things low-key was wildly at odds with everyone else’s. If
you’re trying not to draw attention to a relationship, it’s perhaps not the best
idea to regularly send your partner two dozen long-stemmed yellow roses at
work, particularly if he works in an open-plan office. With the benefit of
hindsight, the Cartier watch was probably a mistake as well. It was so
expensive that David had to wear it all the time. He couldn’t leave it at home,
in case his flat got burgled, because he didn’t have any insurance. Questioned
by his colleagues as to where it came from — and if it might in some way be
linked to the fact that his desk suddenly looked like a stand at the Chelsea
Flower Show — he invented a beloved grandmother back in Canada, who had
recently died and left him some money in her will, then spent an awkward
afternoon fending off a succession of sad smiles, supportive hugs and
expressions of condolence. When we arranged a weekend in Paris and I went
to meet him off his plane at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I was fully briefed
about the need to go unnoticed by any photographers or fans who happened
to be there. Waiting in the arrivals lounge, I became aware of a degree of
nudging and pointing going on around me. By the time David appeared, I was
in a state of considerable agitation.

“Get in the car quickly,’ I hissed. ‘I think I’ve been recognized.’

David smiled. ‘Really? I wonder why?’ he said, directing his gaze to my

outfit. The clothes I had decided would enable me to pass unnoticed through
the airport consisted of a pair of harlequin-check leggings and an oversized
shirt decorated in brightly coloured rococo patterns, accessorized with an
enormous jewelled crucifix around my neck. I could possibly have drawn
more attention to myself, but only if I’d turned up with a piano and started
playing ‘Crocodile Rock’.

The leggings and the oversized shirt were by Gianni Versace, my
favourite designer. I wore his clothes all the time. I’d discovered his little
shop in Milan at the end of the eighties and immediately become obsessed. I
thought I had stumbled across a genius, the greatest menswear designer since
Yves Saint Laurent. He used the very best materials, but there was nothing
starchy or po-faced about his designs: he made men’s clothes that were fun to
wear. My already high opinion skyrocketed when I was introduced to the
man behind them. Meeting Gianni was almost weird, like finding out I had a
long-lost twin brother in northern Italy. We were virtually identical: same
sense of humour, same love of gossip, same interest in collecting, same
unquiet mind. He couldn’t switch off; he was always thinking, always
coming up with some new way of doing what he did, which was everything.
He could design children’s clothes, glassware, dinner services, album covers
—I got him to design the sleeve for The One, which he did beautifully. He
had exquisite taste. He would always know of a little Italian church down a
side street that had the most beautiful mosaic work in the nave, or a tiny
workshop that made the most incredible porcelain. And he was the only
person I’ve ever met who could shop like me. He would go out to buy a
watch and come back with twenty.

Actually, he was worse than me. Gianni was so extravagant, that by
comparison I looked like the embodiment of frugal living and self-sacrifice.
He thought Miuccia Prada was a communist, because she had designed a
handbag made from nylon, rather than crocodile or snakeskin or whatever
preposterously opulent material he was working with that season. He would
try and encourage me to buy the most outrageously expensive things.

‘I ’ave found you the most incredible tablecloth, you must buy it, for
dinner on Christmas Day. Made by nuns, it takes them thirty years to make,
look at it, it’s wonderful. It costs a million dollars.’

Even I baulked at that. I said I thought a million dollars was perhaps a
little excessive for something that would be completely destroyed the second
anyone spilt a bit of gravy on it. Gianni looked horrified, as if he was
considering the possibility that I might be a communist too.

‘But Elton,’ he spluttered, ‘it’s beautiful ... the craftsmanship.’

I didn’t buy the tablecloth, but it didn’t affect our friendship. Gianni
became my closest friend. I used to love picking up the phone and hearing his
voice, delivering its usual greeting: ‘‘Allo, bitch.’ I introduced him to David
and they got on like a house on fire. Of course they did; there was nothing not
to like about Gianni, unless you designed handbags out of nylon. He had the
biggest heart and he was hilarious. ‘When I die,’ he would cry dramatically,
‘I want to be reincarnated even more gay. I want to be super-gay!’ David and
I would exchange puzzled glances, wondering how that could conceivably be
possible. There were leather bars on Fire Island less obviously homosexual
than Gianni.

Sometimes, being in a normal relationship made me realize how abnormal
my own life frequently was. I arranged a small lunch party, so David could
meet my mother and Derf. By then our relationship wasn’t secret anymore.
Someone from David’s office had spotted us getting out of a car outside the
Planet Hollywood restaurant in Piccadilly. He’d been called in to see his
boss, told him everything, then made plans to go back to Toronto for
Christmas and come out to his family. I was incredibly nervous: David had
said his father was very conservative, and I knew how horrific coming out
could be if your family weren’t supportive. In Atlanta, I’d had an affair with a
guy called Rob, whose parents were very religious and anti-gay. He was a
sweetheart, but you could tell the conflict between his sexuality, religion and
his parents’ views was constantly eating away at him. We stayed friends, and
after we broke up he came to see me on my birthday and brought me some
flowers. The next day, he walked onto the freeway and threw himself in front
of a truck.

It turned out that David’s family couldn’t have taken the news better — I
think, more than anything, they were pleased he wasn’t keeping secrets from
them anymore — but I had still held off as long as I could from introducing
him to my mother. Ever since I broke up with John Reid, she had developed a

habit of ... not seeing off my partners exactly, but being cold towards them,
making their lives and mine more difficult, as if she resented the presence of
anyone who detracted attention from her.

But the problem with the lunch party wasn’t really my mum. It was one of
the other guests, a psychiatrist, who at the last minute informed me that his
client Michael Jackson was in England, and asked if he could bring him
along. This didn’t sound like the greatest idea I’d ever heard, but I could
hardly refuse. I’d known Michael since he was thirteen or fourteen: after a
gig I played in Philadelphia, Elizabeth Taylor had turned up on the Starship
with him in tow. He was just the most adorable kid you could imagine. But at
some point in the intervening years, he started sequestering himself away
from the world, and away from reality, the way Elvis Presley did. God knows
what was going on in his head, and God knows what prescription drugs he
was being pumped full of, but every time I saw him in his later years I came
away thinking the poor guy had totally lost his marbles. I don’t mean that in a
light-hearted way. He was genuinely mentally ill, a disturbing person to be
around. It was incredibly sad, but he was someone you couldn’t help: he was
just gone, off in a world of his own, surrounded by people who only told him
what he wanted to hear.

And now he was coming to the lunch at which my boyfriend was
scheduled to meet my mother for the first time. Fantastic. I decided the best
plan was to ring David and drop this information into the conversation as
nonchalantly as possible. Perhaps if I behaved as if there was no problem
here, he might take it in his stride. Or perhaps not — I hadn’t even finished
nonchalantly mentioning the change in lunch plans before I was interrupted
by an anguished yell of ‘are you fucking KIDDING me?’ IJ tried to reassure
him by lying through my teeth, promising that the reports he had heard of
Michael’s eccentricities had been greatly exaggerated. This probably wasn’t
very convincing, given that some of the reports of Michael’s eccentricities
had come directly from me. But no, I insisted, it wouldn’t be as strange as he
might expect.

In that respect at least, I was absolutely right. The meal wasn’t as strange
as I might have expected. It was stranger than I could have imagined. It was a
sunny day and we had to sit indoors with the curtains drawn because of

Michael’s vitiligo. The poor guy looked awful, really frail and ill. He was
wearing make-up that looked like it had been applied by a maniac: it was all
over the place. His nose was covered with a sticking plaster which kept what
was left of it attached to his face. He sat there, not really saying anything, just
giving off waves of discomfort the way some people give off an air of
confidence. I somehow got the impression he hadn’t eaten a meal around
other people for a very long time. Certainly, he wouldn’t eat anything we
served up. He brought his own chef with him, but didn’t eat anything he
made, either. After a while, he got up from the table without a word and
disappeared. We finally found him, two hours later, in a cottage in the
grounds of Woodside where my housekeeper lived: she was sitting there,
watching Michael Jackson quietly playing video games with her eleven-year-
old son. For whatever reason, he couldn’t seem to cope with adult company
at all. While all this was going on, I could see David though the gloom,
sitting at the other end of the table, valiantly trying to make bright
conversation with my mother, who was doing her bit to add to the strained
atmosphere by spending most of the meal telling him that she thought
psychiatry was a waste of time and money in a voice loud enough for
Michael Jackson’s psychiatrist to hear. Whenever she paused for breath, I
noticed David glancing around, as if looking for someone who might explain
what the hell he’d got himself into.

It didn’t take an unexpected visit from Michael Jackson to make the
world David was entering seem completely bizarre. I could make it seem that
way myself, without any help from the self-styled King of Pop. Rehab had
curbed most of my worst excesses but not all of them: the Dwight Family
Temper seemed particularly resistant to any kind of treatment or medical
intervention. I was still perfectly capable of throwing appalling tantrums
when I felt like it. I think the first time David really saw one up close was the
night in January 1994 when I was due to be inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame in New York. I didn’t want to go, because I don’t really see the
point of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I loved the original idea of it —
honouring the true pioneers of rock and roll, the artists who laid the path in
the fifties that the rest of us followed, especially the ones who got ripped off
financially — but it quickly became something else entirely, a big televised

ceremony with tickets that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It’s just about
getting enough big names involved each year to put bums on seats.

The smart thing would have been to politely decline the invitation, but I
felt obliged. I was being inducted by Axl Rose, who I really liked. I had got
in touch with him when he was being ripped apart in the press: I know how
lonely it can feel when the papers are giving you a kicking, and I just wanted
to offer some support. We got on great and ended up performing ‘Bohemian
Rhapsody’ together at the Freddie Mercury Tribute gig. I got a lot of flak for
that, because a Guns N’ Roses song called ‘One In A Million’ had
homophobic lyrics. If I’d thought it reflected his personal views, I wouldn’t
have touched him. But I didn’t — I thought it was pretty obvious the song was
written from the point of view of a character who wasn’t Axl Rose. It was the
same with Eminem: when I performed with him at the Grammys, the Gay
and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation gave me a really hard time, but it
was obvious that his lyrics were about adopting a persona — a deliberately
repugnant persona at that. I didn’t think either of them were actually
homophobes any more than I thought Sting was actually going out with a
prostitute called Roxanne, or Johnny Cash actually shot a man in Reno just to
watch him die.

So I went along to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As soon as I got
there, I decided I’d made a mistake, turned round and left, ranting all the way
about how the place was a fucking mausoleum. I dragged David back to the
hotel, where I immediately felt guilty for blowing them out. So we went
back. The Grateful Dead were performing with a cardboard cut-out of Jerry
Garcia, because Jerry Garcia wasn’t there: he thought the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame was a load of bullshit, and had refused to attend. I decided Jerry had
a point, turned round and left again, with David dutifully in tow. I had got out
of my suit and into the hotel dressing gown when I was once more struck by
a pang of guilt. So I got back into my suit and we returned to the awards
ceremony. Then I got angry at myself for feeling guilty and stormed out
again, once more enlivening the journey back to the hotel with a lengthy
oration, delivered at enormous volume, about what a waste of time the whole
evening was. By now, David’s sympathetic nods and murmurs of agreement
were starting to take on a slightly strained tone, but I convinced myself he

was probably rolling his eyes like that at the manifest failings of the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame rather than at me. This made it easier to decide — ten
minutes later — that all things considered, we had better go back to the
ceremony yet again. The other guests looked quite surprised to see us, but
you could hardly blame them: we’d been backwards and forwards to our
table more often than the waiting staff.

I’d like to tell you it ended there, but I fear there may have been another
change of heart and furious return to the hotel before I actually got onstage
and accepted the award. Axl Rose gave a beautiful speech, I called Bernie up
onstage and gave the award to him, then we left. We drove back to the hotel
in silence, which was eventually broken by David.

‘Well,’ he said quietly, ‘that was quite a dramatic evening.’ Then he
paused. ‘Elton,’ he asked plaintively, ‘is your life always like this?’

I suspect nights like that got David interested in making Tantrums and
Tiaras, although it was my idea to begin with. A film company wanted to
make a documentary about me, but I thought it would be more interesting if it
was made by someone close to me, who had access I would never give
anyone else. I didn’t want a load of whitewashed bullshit, I wanted people to
really see what it was like being me: the funny parts, the ridiculous aspects.
And I got the feeling David wanted the world to know what he had to put up
with. It was like a way of making sense of this insane life that he’d become
part of, that had become his life, too. So he set up a little office in the tram I’d
bought in Australia — you see, I knew it would come in useful one day — and
started filming.

I wasn’t afraid about people seeing the monstrous, unreasonable side of
me. I’m perfectly aware how ridiculous my life is, and perfectly aware of
what an arsehole I look like when I lose my temper over nothing — I go from
nought to nuclear in seconds and then calm down just as quickly. My temper
was obviously inherited from my mum and dad, but I honestly think that,
somewhere within them, every creative artist, whether they’re a painter, a
theatre director, an actor or a musician, has the ability to behave in a
completely unreasonable way. It’s like the dark side of being creative.
Certainly, virtually every other artist I had become friends with seemed to
have that aspect to their character too. John Lennon did, Marc Bolan, Dusty

Springfield. They were wonderful people, and I loved them to bits, but
everyone knows they all had their moments. In fact, Dusty had so many that
she told me she’d worked out the secret of throwing a tantrum successfully: if
you got to the stage where you started hurling inanimate objects around the
room, you had to make sure you didn’t hurl anything that was expensive or
difficult to replace. I’m just more honest about it than a lot of people,
especially these days. Today, record labels give pop stars media training; they
literally school them to try and cover up any flaws in their character, to never
say anything out of line.

You don’t have to be an expert on the subject of my career to know that I
come from a different era, before anyone thought pop stars needed to be told
what they should and shouldn’t say to the media. I’m really glad, even though
I’ve said things that have caused a lot of controversy and kept newspapers in
articles head-lined THE BITCH IS BACK for decades. It probably was a bit
cruel to say that Keith Richards looked like a monkey with arthritis, but, in
fairness, he’d been pretty foul about me: he got as good as he gave. The only
time I caused real trouble was when I told an American Sunday newspaper
magazine called Parade that I thought Jesus might well have been a very
intelligent, super-compassionate gay man. I just meant that no one really
knows anything about Jesus’s personal life, and that you can extrapolate all
sorts of ideas from his teachings about forgiveness and empathy. But the
religious nuts didn’t take it that way: the big idea they seemed to have
extrapolated from Jesus’s teachings was that you should go around inciting
people to kill anyone who says something you don’t like. I ended up with
officers from the Atlanta police force sleeping in my guest room for a week.
There were protesters outside the apartment building, waving banners, one of
which said ELTON JOHN MUST DIE — not really what you want to see on
your doorstep when you come home of an evening. The guy holding it posted
a video on YouTube threatening to kill me. He ended up being arrested, and
the protests died down.

Even so, I still think a world in which artists are coached not to say
anything that might upset anyone and are presented as perfect figures is
boring. Furthermore, it’s a lie. Artists aren’t perfect. No one is perfect. That’s
why I hate whitewashed documentaries about rock stars where everyone’s

telling you what a wonderful person they were. Most rock stars can be
horrible sometimes. They can be fabulous and charming and they can be
outrageous and stupid, and that’s what I wanted to show in Tantrums and
Tiaras.

Not everyone thought it was a good idea. George Michael watched some
of the footage and he was horrified: not because of what he saw — he already
knew what I was like — but because I was actually going to put it out. He
thought it was a terrible mistake. John Reid said he was on board with the
idea, but then quietly went around trying to sabotage the whole project. After
my mother agreed to be interviewed for it, he went behind my back and told
her not to get involved because it was just going to be about sex and drugs.

I was furious about that, but I didn’t care what other people thought. I
usually can’t stand to watch myself in anything, but I loved Tantrums and
Tiaras, because it was real. David and the producer Polly Steele just followed
me around on my 1995 world tour with little Hi-8 camcorders, and most of
the time I forgot I was being filmed. It’s hilarious: me making these
completely ridiculous threats, screaming that I’m never coming to France
again because a fan waved at me while I was trying to play tennis, or that I’m
never making another video because someone’s inadvertently left my clothes
in the back of a car. Watching it was cathartic, and I think the shock of seeing
myself changed the way I behave — well, that and a lot of therapy. I’ve still
got a temper — you can’t change your genes — but I’m a lot more aware of
what a waste of energy it is, how completely stupid I feel once I’ve calmed
down, so I try to keep it in check: admittedly with varying degrees of success,
but at least I’m making an effort.

In fact, the only thing I regret about Tantrums and Tiaras is how
influential it became. It really spawned that whole genre of reality TV where
you see into a celebrity’s life, or worse, someone who’s become a celebrity
for being on reality TV. You know, it’s not exactly the most edifying thing
having Being Bobby Brown and The Anna Nicole Show on your conscience.
There’s a sense in which Keeping Up with the Kardashians might ultimately
be my fault, for which I can only prostrate myself before the human race and
beg their forgiveness.

Tantrums and Tiaras was finally released in 1997: David was coming back
from a press conference in Pasadena for its American launch when I found
out Gianni Versace had been murdered. I had bought a house in Nice and
Gianni was meant to be flying out to France to have a holiday with David and
me the following week — the tickets were booked — when a serial killer shot
him outside his mansion in Miami: he’d already murdered men in Minnesota,
Chicago and New Jersey and was supposed to have become obsessed with
Gianni after meeting him briefly at a nightclub years before, although I don’t
think anyone knows whether he actually met him or not.

When John Reid rang and told me what had happened, I completely went
to pieces. I turned on the TV in the bedroom and sat there, watching the
coverage, bawling. Gianni had been out doing his morning routine. Each day,
he got every international paper, every magazine. There were always piles of
them lying around his house, with Post-it notes all over them: ideas that had
caught his attention, things he thought he could work with, stuff he found
inspiring. And now he was dead. It was like John Lennon’s death — there was
no explanation, nothing whatsoever about it that made it any easier to
comprehend, no way of rationalizing it in your head, even slightly. Another
random murder.

His family asked me to perform at his memorial service, at the Duomo in
Milan. They wanted me to duet with Sting: the 23rd Psalm again, the same
piece I’d sung in the cathedral in Sydney after John died. The service was
mayhem. There were paparazzi everywhere, film crews and photographers
even in the church. It was claustrophobic but, in a weird way, it’s what
Gianni would have wanted. He loved publicity, to the point where it was the
one thing about him that drove me up the wall. You would go on holiday
with him to Sardinia, and every single place you went, Gianni’s PR people
would have rung up the press beforehand and tipped them off. I’d tell him I
hated it, but he didn’t get that at all: ‘Oh, Elton, but they love you, they want
to take your picture, is beautiful, no? They love you.’ At the cathedral, two
officials — monsignors or cardinals or whatever they were — called me and
Sting out in front of the congregation and started quizzing us about our
performance: I think they didn’t really want us to sing because we weren’t

Catholics. It was horrible, like being dragged out before the school by the
headmaster at assembly but in the middle of a memorial service in a church
filled with TV cameras and flashes going off.

We were eventually allowed to sing and got through the performance,
which was a miracle. I couldn’t stop crying. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a
human being look so beside themselves with grief as Allegra, Gianni’s little
niece. She was eleven when he died, and he doted on her: he left his share of
the business to her in his will. She somehow blamed herself for his death,
because she used to go and get the papers with him every morning, but the
morning he died, she’d been in Rome with her mum. She thought that if she
had been with her uncle, he wouldn’t have been killed. After his death, she
developed a terrible eating disorder. She would go missing and they would
find her hiding in wardrobes in the house, clutching his old clothes, things
that still smelt of him. It was awful. Just awful.

In fact, the whole Versace family went to pieces after Gianni’s death.
Donatella had always had a cocaine problem. Everyone knew, except Gianni.
He was incredibly naive about drugs. He didn’t even drink: he would have a
glass of red wine and put Sprite and ice cubes in it, which I imagine tastes
revolting enough to put you off investigating alcohol any further. At Versace
events, he would go to bed early, and then the party would really start, with
Donatella leading the charge. He realized that something was wrong with her,
but he couldn’t work out what it was. I remember walking around the garden
at Woodside with him, listening to him going, ‘I don’t understand my sister —
one day she’s good, one day she’s bad, she has moods, I don’t understand it.’
I told him that she was a cocaine addict, that I’d done coke with her many
times before I got clean. He couldn’t believe it — he had no inkling
whatsoever of what her life was like when he wasn’t around.

But after his murder, Donatella’s coke use got completely out of control. I
didn’t see much of her — she was avoiding me because she knew I
disapproved — but then, one night, she turned up backstage at a gig I was
playing in Reggio Calabria out of her mind, really high. While I was playing,
she sat at the side of the stage in floods of tears. She never stopped crying
throughout the entire show. Either she really hated my performance or she
was asking for help.

So we decided to stage an intervention. David and her publicist Jason
Weisenfeld arranged it, at Allegra’s eighteenth birthday party in Gianni’s old
apartment on Via Gesu. I was there, with David and Jason and our friends
Ingrid Sischy and her partner Sandy, all waiting in this little sitting room.
Donatella and Allegra came in, wearing these unbelievably extravagant,
gorgeous Atelier Versace gowns, and sat on a divan as everyone spoke in
turn. There was an awful silence. You never know how an intervention is
going to go: if the person it’s aimed at isn’t ready to admit they’ve got a
problem, it just turns into a disaster. Suddenly, Donatella spoke up. ‘My life
is like your candle in the wind!’ she cried dramatically. ‘I want to die!’

We got her on the phone to a rehab facility called The Meadows in
Scottsdale, Arizona. We could only hear her side of the conversation, which
was extraordinary. ‘Yes, yes ... cocaine ... also pills ... oh, a handful of this
pill, a handful of that pill, and if that doesn’t work I take all the pills and mix
them together ... yes ... OK, I come now, but one condition: NO OILY
FOOD.’

Having presumably been assured that oily food wasn’t on the menu, off
she went, still in her gown. The next day, we got a phone call from Jason
Weisenfeld, who told us she had been admitted. Apparently the facility’s rule
that residential patients weren’t allowed to wear make-up had gone down
pretty badly, and there had been a bit of fuss when Donatella realized she’d
forgotten to pack a deodorant but, other than that, she was fine: she went on
to complete the programme and get clean. We congratulated Jason on pulling
the whole thing off.

“Yeah,” he said glumly. ‘All I have to do now is walk around Scottsdale
trying to find a fucking Chanel deodorant.’

“oe

After the funeral, we invited Gianni’s partner Antonio to come and stay with
us in Nice. He was distraught, and he never really got on with the rest of
Gianni’s family. It was a very strange, sombre summer, sitting in the house
we’d just bought, that we’d decorated in a style influenced by Gianni’s taste,
that we’d been waiting to show off to him and get his opinion on. One night,
David said very firmly that it was time I thought about hiring professional

security. I’?d never bothered before, not even after John was murdered. I had
employed a guy called Jim Morris as a bodyguard in the seventies, but that
was more a camp affectation than anything. He was a bodybuilder who’d
been crowned Mr America, and openly gay — no small thing for a black tough
guy to be in those days — and he spent more time carrying me onstage on his
shoulders than anything else. Now it seemed we genuinely needed security.
Things had changed.

And our summer was about to get stranger still. One Sunday morning, at
the end of August, we were woken by the sound of the fax machine going off.
David went to look at it and came back with a sheet of paper, with a
handwritten message from a friend in London: ‘so sorry to hear about this
awful news’. Neither of us knew what it meant. It couldn’t possibly be
referring to Gianni — he had been dead for six weeks now. With a mounting
sense of dread, I switched the television on. And that was how I found out
Princess Diana had died.

fourteen

I first met Diana in 1981, just before she and Prince Charles were married. It
was at Prince Andrew’s twenty-first birthday party at Windsor Castle; Ray
Cooper and I were supposed to be providing the entertainment. It was a
completely surreal evening. The outside of the castle was illuminated with
psychedelic lighting, and before we performed, the entertainment in the
ballroom came courtesy of a mobile disco. Because the Queen was there, and
no one wanted to cause any offence to the royal sensibilities, the disco was
turned down about as low as you could get without switching it off
altogether. You could literally hear your feet moving around on the floor over
the music. Princess Anne asked me to dance with her to ‘Hound Dog’ by
Elvis Presley. Well, I say dance: I ended up just awkwardly shuffling from
foot to foot, trying to make as little noise as I could so that I didn’t drown out
the music. If you strained your ears and concentrated hard, you could just
about make out that the DJ had segued from Elvis into ‘Rock Around The
Clock’. Then the Queen appeared, carrying her handbag. She walked over to
us and asked if she could join us. So now I was trying to dance as inaudibly
as possible with Princess Anne and the Queen — still holding her handbag —
while what appeared to be the world’s quietest disco played Bill Haley.
Weirdly, it made me think of The Band barging into my dressing room or
Brian Wilson endlessly singing the chorus of ‘Your Song’ at me when I first
went to America. It was eleven years later, my life had changed beyond
recognition, and yet here I was, still desperately trying to act normal, while
the world around me appeared to have gone completely mad.

And that was the thing about my interactions with the Royal Family. I

always found them incredibly charming and funny people. I know the
Queen’s public image isn’t exactly one of wild frivolity, but I think that’s
more to do with the nature of her job. I noticed it when I got the CBE, and
then the knighthood. She has to spend two and a half hours handing the
things out, making small talk with two hundred people, one after the other.
Anyone would be hard pressed to come up with a string of brilliant witticisms
in that position. She just asks you if you’re busy at the moment, you say ‘yes,
Ma’am’, she says ‘how lovely’ and moves on. But in private she could be
hilarious. At another party, I saw her approach Viscount Linley and ask him
to look in on his sister, who’d been taken ill and retired to her room. When he
repeatedly tried to fob her off, the Queen lightly slapped him across the face,
saying ‘Don’t’ — SLAP — ‘argue’ — SLAP — ‘with’ — SLAP — ‘me’ — SLAP —
‘Tl’ — SLAP — ‘am’ — SLAP — ‘THE QUEEN!’ That seemed to do the trick. As
he left, she saw me staring at her, gave me a wink and walked off.

Yet no matter how funny or normal the Royal Family seemed, whether
they were complaining about the paint job on my Aston Martin, or asking me
if I'd done any coke before I went onstage, or winking at me after slapping
their nephew across the face, there would inevitably come a moment where
I'd find myself feeling slightly out of place, thinking: ‘This is just bizarre.
I’m a musician from a council house on Pinner Road — what am I doing
here?’ But with Diana it wasn’t like that. Despite her status and background,
she was blessed with an incredible social ease, an ability to talk to anybody,
to make herself seem ordinary, to make people feel totally comfortable in her
company. Her kids have inherited it, Prince Harry in particular; he’s exactly
the same as his mum, completely without any interest in formality or
grandeur. That famous photo of her holding an AIDS patient’s hand at the
London Middlesex Hospital — that was Diana. I don’t think she was
necessarily trying to make a big point, although obviously she did: in that
moment, she changed public attitudes to AIDS forever. She just met someone
suffering, dying in agony: why wouldn’t you reach out and touch them? It’s
the natural human impulse, to try and comfort someone.

That night in 1981, she arrived in the ballroom and we immediately
clicked. We ended up pretending to dance the Charleston while hooting at the
disco’s feebleness. She was fabulous company, the best dinner party guest,

incredibly indiscreet, a real gossip: you could ask her anything and she’d tell
you. The only peculiar thing about her was the way she talked about Prince
Charles. She never mentioned him by name; it was always ‘my husband’,
never Charles, certainly never an affectionate nickname. It seemed very
distant, cold and formal, which was very strange, because the one thing Diana
wasn’t was formal: she was always incredulous at how starchy and proper
some other members of the Royal Family could be.

But if I was bowled over by Diana, it was nothing compared to the impact
she could have on straight men. They seemed to completely lose their minds
in her presence: they were just utterly bewitched. When I was making The
Lion King, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Disney, came over to England,
and we threw a dinner party for him and his wife Marilyn at Woodside. I
asked them if there was anyone in Britain they really wanted to meet and,
Straight away, they said ‘Princess Diana’. So we invited her, and George
Michael, Richard Curtis and his wife Emma Freud, Richard Gere and
Sylvester Stallone, all of whom were in the country at the time. The most
peculiar scene developed. Straight away, Richard Gere and Diana seemed
very taken with each other. She was separated from Prince Charles by this
point, and Richard had just broken up with Cindy Crawford, and they ended
up sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace together, locked in rapt
conversation. As the rest of us chatted, I couldn’t help notice a slightly
strange atmosphere in the room. Judging by the kind of looks he kept
shooting them, the sight of Diana and Richard Gere’s newly blossoming
friendship was not going down very well with Sylvester Stallone at all. I
think he might have tumed up to the party with the express intention of
picking Diana up, only to find his plans for the evening unexpectedly ruined.

Eventually, dinner was served. We moved into the dining room and
seated ourselves at the table. Or at least, most of us did. There was no sign of
Richard Gere, or indeed Sylvester Stallone. We waited. Still no sign. Finally,
I asked David to go and find them. He came back with both of them, but he
was wearing a fairly ashen expression.

‘Elton,’ he mumbled. ‘We have ... a situation.’

It transpired that when David had gone out to find them, he’d discovered
Sylvester Stallone and Richard Gere in the corridor, squaring up to each

other, apparently about to settle their differences over Diana by having a
fistfight. He’d managed to calm things down by pretending he hadn’t noticed
what was going on — ‘Hey, guys! Time for dinner!’ — but Sylvester clearly
still wasn’t happy. After dinner, Diana and Richard Gere resumed their
position together in front of the fire, and Sylvester eventually stormed off
home.

‘I never would have come,’ he snapped, as David and I showed him to the
door, ‘if I’d known Prince fuckin’ Charming was gonna be here.’ Then he
added: ‘If I’?d wanted her, I would’ve taken her!’

We managed to wait until his car was out of sight before we started
laughing. Back in the living room, Diana and Richard Gere were still gazing
raptly at each other. She seemed completely unruffled. Maybe she hadn’t
realized what was happening. Or maybe stuff like that happened all the time
and she was used to it. After she died, people started talking about something
called the Diana Effect, meaning the way she managed to change the public’s
attitudes to the Royal Family, or to AIDS or bulimia or mental health. But
every time I heard the phrase, I thought about that night. There was definitely
another kind of Diana Effect: one that could bring Hollywood superstars to
the verge of a punch-up over her attentions at a dinner party, like a couple of
love-struck teenage idiots.

She was a very dear friend for years, and then, completely unexpectedly,
we fell out. The cause was a book Gianni Versace put together called Rock
and Royalty. It was a collection of portraits by great photographers: Richard
Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Herb Ritts, Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe. The
proceeds were going to the AIDS Foundation, and she agreed to write the
foreword. Then she got cold feet. I think Buckingham Palace didn’t like the
idea of a member of the Royal Family having anything to do with a book that
featured shots of naked guys with towels draped around them. So, at the last
moment, Diana withdrew her foreword. She said she had no idea of the
book’s contents, which just wasn’t true: Gianni had shown her the whole
thing and she had said she loved it. I wrote back to her, calling her out, telling
her how much money she had cost the AIDS Foundation, reminding her that
she had seen the book. The letter I got back was very formal and severe:
‘Dear Mr John...’ And that seemed to be the end of that. I was angry with

her, but I was also worried. She seemed to be losing touch with all sorts of
really close friends, who would be honest with her and tell her the truth. She
was surrounding herself instead with people who told her what she wanted to
hear, or who would listen and nod when she came out with some of the more
paranoid theories she’d developed about the Royal Family since her divorce.
I knew from personal experience that wasn’t a healthy situation.

I didn’t speak to her again until the day Gianni was murdered. She was
the first person to call me after John Reid rang and told me he was dead. I
don’t even know how she got hold of the number; we hadn’t had the house in
Nice for long. She was just down the coast, in St-Tropez, on Dodi Fayed’s
yacht. She asked how I was, if I’d spoken to Donatella. Then she said, ‘I’m
so sorry. It was a silly falling-out. Let’s be friends.’

She came with us to the funeral, looking incredible: tanned from her
holiday, wearing a pearl necklace. She was the same warm, caring, tactile
person she had always been. When she walked in, the paparazzi in the church
went crazy: it was like the biggest star in the world had arrived, which I
suppose she had. They didn’t let up throughout the service, although I feel I
should point out that the famous shot they got of her supposedly consoling
me — where she’s leaning forward towards me, speaking, while I’m red-eyed
and glazed with grief — is one moment in the service where she wasn’t doing
anything of the sort. They snapped her just as she was leaning past me,
reaching for a mint that David offered her. The warm words of comfort
coming from her lips at that exact moment were actually, ‘God, I’d love a
Polo.’

I wrote to her afterwards, thanking her, and she wrote back offering to be
a patron of the AIDS Foundation and asking if I would get involved in her
landmine charity. We were going to meet up next time we were both in
London to have lunch and discuss it. But there wasn’t a next time.

Oe OR

A couple of days after her death, I got a phone call from Richard Branson. He
told me that when people signed the book of condolence at St James’s Palace,
a lot of them were writing down quotations from the lyrics of ‘Candle In The
Wind’. Apparently, they were playing it a lot on the radio in the UK as well —

stations had changed from their usual musical format and were broadcasting
sombre-sounding music to reflect the public mood. Then he asked if I would
be prepared to rewrite the lyrics and sing it at the funeral. I hadn’t been
expecting that at all. I think Richard had been contacted by the Spencer
family, because they felt the funeral should be something that people would
really connect to: they didn’t want a severe, remote royal event full of
pageantry and protocol, because that wouldn’t have fitted Diana’s character
at all.

So I called Bernie. I thought it was an incredibly tough gig for him. Not
only was whatever he wrote going to be broadcast live to literally billions of
people — it was obvious that the funeral would be a huge, global, televised
event — it had to be vetted by the Royal Family and the Church of England.
But he was fantastic: he acted as if writing a song that the Queen and the
Archbishop of Canterbury had to check through first was all in a day’s work.
He faxed the lyrics over the next morning, I faxed them to Richard Branson
and they were waved through.

Even so, when I went to rehearse at Westminster Abbey the day before
the funeral, I had no idea what to expect. The memory of Gianni’s memorial
service, the fact that the church officials clearly hadn’t thought it appropriate
for me to perform, played on my mind. And that was just singing a hymn at a
private service, not performing a rock song at a state event. What if people
didn’t really want me here either?

But it couldn’t have been more different. The Archbishop of Canterbury
was incredibly nice and hugely supportive. There was a real sense of
camaraderie, that everyone had to pull together to make this thing work. I
insisted on having a teleprompter by the piano, with Bernie’s new lyrics on it.
Up until then, I had been against their use. Partly because it seemed
antithetical to the spontaneous spirit of rock and roll — you know, I’m pretty
sure Little Richard wasn’t reading the words off an autocue when he recorded
‘Long Tall Sally’ — and partly because I just thought: come on, do your job
properly. You’ve really only got three things to do onstage — sing in tune,
play the right notes and remember the words. If you can only be bothered to
do two of them you may as well go and find another job instead — it’s why I
have such a problem with artists miming onstage. But this time, I thought I

could relax the rules slightly. It was a completely unique experience, a one-
off. There was a sense in which it was the biggest gig of my life — for four
minutes, I was literally going to be the centre of the world’s attention — but
equally, it wasn’t an Elton John moment, it wasn’t about me at all. It was
very strange.

Just how strange was underlined when we arrived at Westminster Abbey
the next day. David and I went with George Michael; this was long before we
fell out over his drug problems. He had rung up and asked if we could go to
the funeral together. On the car journey there, we just sat in silence: George
was too upset to speak, there was no conversation, nothing. The place was
full of people I knew: Donatella Versace was there, David Frost, Tom Cruise
and Nicole Kidman, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. It all felt slightly surreal,
like a dream you were having rather than something that was actually
happening in real life. We were seated in the inner sanctum of the church,
right where the Royal Family came in. William and Harry looked completely
shell-shocked. They were fifteen and twelve, and I thought the way they were
treated that day was absolutely inhuman. They were forced to walk through
the streets of London behind their mother’s coffin, told to show no emotion
and look straight ahead. It was a horrendous way to treat two kids who’d just
lost their mum.

But I barely took any of it in. I wasn’t suffering from nerves, exactly. I’d
be lying if I said the thought that two billion people were watching never
crossed my mind, but at least I was performing in front of the part of the
church where they had put all the representatives from the charities Diana
supported, so there were friends from the Elton John AIDS Foundation there
— Robert Key, Anne Aslett and James Locke. But it was less stage fright than
a very specific fear: what if I went into autopilot and sang the wrong version?
I’d performed ‘Candle In The Wind’ hundreds of times. It really wasn’t
beyond the realms of possibility that I might lose myself in the performance,
forget about the teleprompter altogether and start singing the original lyrics.
How bad could it be if I did that? Appalling. People might have been quoting
lines from them in the book of condolence at St James’s Palace, but huge
chunks of the lyrics were obviously completely inappropriate for the
occasion. You’d have a hard time bluffing your way out of singing about

Marilyn Monroe being found dead in the nude, or how your feelings were
something more than sexual, at a state funeral, in front of a global audience
of two billion people or whatever it was supposed to be.

And then an odd thing happened. I found myself zoning out of the funeral
and thinking about an incident from years before, on my first tour of
America. I had been booked to appear on The Andy Williams Show with
Mama Cass Elliot from The Mamas and The Papas and Ray Charles. When I
arrived, the producers blithely informed me that we weren’t just going to be
performing on the same show, we were going to be performing together.
They seemed to think this was a wonderful surprise for me, that I was going
to be delighted about it. They thought wrong: Mama Cass, fine, Andy
Williams, fine, but Ray Charles? Are you joking? Ray Charles! Brother Ray!
The Genius! An artist I’d spent hours fantasizing about being when I was a
kid, hiding in my bedroom with my record collection, miming away to his
Ray Charles at Newport live album. And now some idiot had decided that it
was a marvellous idea for him to go on national TV and sing with me, as if a
completely unknown English singer-songwriter was some kind of perfect
musical counterpart for the man who’d basically single-handedly invented
soul music. If it wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard, it sounded so much like
it as to make no difference. And there was absolutely nothing I could do
about it. My career was just beginning, it was my first appearance on US TV.
I was in no position to start upsetting American television executives by
being difficult. So I did it. I got up and sang ‘Heaven Help Us All’ with Ray
Charles — him playing a white piano, me playing a black piano. It went
perfectly. Ray Charles was gracious and kind and encouraging — ‘Hey,
sweetheart, how you doin’?’ — as artists who don’t have anything to prove
tend to be.

And it really taught me something important. Sometimes, you just have to
step up to the plate, even if the plate is miles outside your comfort zone. It’s
like going deep inside yourself, forgetting about whatever emotions you may
have and thinking: no, I’m a performer. This is what I do. Get on with it.

So I got on with it. I don’t remember much about the performance itself,
but I remember the applause afterwards. It seemed to start outside
Westminster Abbey and sweep into the church itself, which I guess meant

that Diana’s family had achieved their aim in getting me to sing: it connected
with the people outside. After the funeral, I went straight to Townhouse
Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, where George Martin was waiting: they were
going to release the new version of ‘Candle In The Wind’ as a single to raise
money for a charity memorial fund set up in Diana’s name. I sang it twice,
live at the piano, and went home, leaving George Martin to overdub a string
quartet on it. When I got back to Woodside, David was standing in the
kitchen, watching the coverage on TV. The funeral cortége had got to the
M1: people were throwing flowers at Diana’s hearse from the bridges over
the motorway. That was when I finally broke down. I hadn’t felt able to show
emotion all day. I had a job to do, and how I felt about Diana’s death might
have interfered with my ability to do it; the funeral wasn’t about me, it was
about her. So up until that point, I couldn’t afford to be upset.

The response to the single was crazy. People were queuing up outside
record stores, then rushing in and grabbing armfuls of CD singles and buying
them. There were all these preposterous statistics about it. At one point, it
was supposed to be selling six copies a second; it was the fastest-selling
single ever released; it was the biggest-selling single of all time in Finland. I
got sales awards for it from the most bizarre places: Indonesia, the Middle
East. And it just went on and on and on. It was Number One in America for
fourteen weeks. It was in the Top Twenty in Canada for three years. There
was part of me that couldn’t understand it: why would anyone want to listen
to it? Under what circumstances would you play it? I never did. I sang it three
times — once at the funeral and twice in the studio — then I listened back to it
once to OK the mix and that was it: never again. I suppose people were just
buying it to give money to the charity, which was great, although a huge
chunk of the £38 million it raised was ultimately wasted. The charity got
involved in defending her image rights against people who were making
Diana merchandise — plates and dolls and T-shirts — and the money started
getting swallowed up by lawyers’ fees. It lost a case against an American
company called Franklin Mint and ended up paying them millions, settling a
case of malicious prosecution out of court. Whatever the rights and wrongs of
the situation, I felt it made them look bad, as if they were more interested in
using the money raised to fight over trademarks than in clearing landmines or

helping disadvantaged women, or all the other work they were doing.

In the end, it reached a point where I started feeling really uncomfortable
with the charity single’s longevity. Its success meant there was footage of
Diana’s funeral week after week on Top of the Pops — it felt as if people were
somehow wallowing in her death, like the mourning for her had got out of
hand and they were refusing to move on. It seemed unhealthy to me — morbid
and unnatural. I really didn’t think it was what Diana would have wanted. I
thought the media had gone from reflecting the public mood to deliberately
stoking it, because it sold papers.

It was getting ridiculous, and I didn’t want to do anything to prolong it
any further. So when Oprah Winfrey asked me onto her talk show in the US
to discuss the funeral, I said no. I wouldn’t let them put the funeral version of
‘Candle In The Wind’ on a charity CD released to commemorate her life. It’s
never appeared on any Greatest Hits album I’ve put out and it’s never been
re-released. I even stopped singing the original version of ‘Candle In The
Wind’ live for a few years: I just assumed people needed a rest from hearing
it. When I went back on tour that autumn, I kept well away from it, and
remembered Gianni and Diana by singing a song called ‘Sand And Water’,
from an album by the singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman that was
released the day Gianni was murdered. I’d played it over and over in Nice: ‘I
will see you in the light of a thousand suns, I will hear you in the sound of the
waves, I will know you when I come, as we all will come, through the doors
beyond the grave’. I always tried to avoid the topic with journalists: the chart
nerd in me loved the fact that I’d made the biggest-selling single since the
charts began, but the circumstances around it were such that I didn’t want to
dwell on it. When it was the twentieth anniversary of Diana’s death, I did one
interview, about her AIDS work, because Prince Harry specifically asked me
to.

Perhaps there was also something personal bound up in my feelings about
the single. It had been such a strange, horrible summer. From the moment
Gianni died, it had felt like the world had spun off its axis and gone mad: his
murder, the memorial service, the reconciliation with Diana, the weeks in the
house in France looking after his partner Antonio, Diana’s death, her funeral,
the bedlam around ‘Candle In The Wind’. It wasn’t that I wanted to forget

any of it — I just wanted life to return to some semblance of normality. So I
got back to work. I went on tour. I sold off a load of my old clothes for the
AIDS Foundation, in an event I called ‘Out of the Closet’. I recorded a song
for the cartoon series South Park, which seemed about as far away from
singing ‘Candle In The Wind’ at a state funeral as I could possibly get. I
started discussing setting up a joint tour with Tina Tumer, a nice idea that
quickly turned into a disaster. While it was still at the planning stage, she
rang me up at home, apparently with the express intention of telling me how
awful I was and how I had to change before we could work together. She
didn’t like my hair, she didn’t like the colour of my piano — which for some
reason had to be white — and she didn’t like my clothes.

“You wear too much Versace, and it makes you look fat — you have to
wear Armani,’ she announced.

I could hear poor old Gianni turning in his grave at the very idea: the
houses of Versace and Armani cordially hated each other. Armani said
Versace made really vulgar clothes, and Gianni thought Armani was
unbelievably beige and boring. I got off the phone and burst into tears: ‘She
sounded like my fucking mother,’ I wailed at David. I like to think I’ve
developed a thick skin over the years, but listening to one of the greatest
performers of all time — an artist you’re meant to be collaborating with —
explain in detail how much they hate everything about you is a very
depressing experience.

It wasn’t the greatest start to our working relationship, but, incredibly, our
working relationship got worse. I agreed to perform with her at a big event
called VH1 Divas Live: we were going to do ‘Proud Mary’ and “The Bitch Is
Back’. My band went to rehearsals a couple of days before me, to get a feel
for working with a different singer. When I arrived, I was greeted not by the
joyful sight of musicians bonding over the common language of music, but
the news that if I went on tour with Tina Turner, none of my band was
planning on coming with me, on the grounds that Tina Turner was ‘a fucking
nightmare’. I asked what the problem was.

“You’ll see,’ sighed Davey Johnstone ominously.

He was right. Tina wouldn’t address any of the musicians by name — she
just pointed at them and bellowed ‘Hey, you!’ when she wanted to get their

attention. We started playing ‘Proud Mary’. It sounded great. Tina stopped
the song, unhappy.

‘It’s you,’ she shouted, pointing at my bass player, Bob Birch. ‘You’re
doing it wrong.’

He assured her he wasn’t and we started the song again. Once more, Tina
yelled for us to stop. This time it was supposed to be my drummer Curt’s
fault. It went on like this for a while, stopping and starting every thirty
seconds, every member of the band being accused of messing up in turn, until
Tina finally discovered the real source of the problem. This time, her finger
was pointed in my direction.

‘It’s you! You’re not playing it right!’

I begged her pardon.

“You’re not playing it right,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t know how to play
this song.’

The subsequent debate about whether or not I knew how to play ‘Proud
Mary’ became quite heated quite quickly, before I brought it to a conclusion
by telling Tina Turner to stick her fucking song up her arse and storming off.
I sat in the dressing room alternately fuming and wondering what her
problem was. I’ve thrown plenty of tantrums in my time, but there are limits:
there’s an unspoken rule that musicians don’t treat their fellow musicians like
shit. Maybe it was insecurity on her part. She’d been treated appallingly
earlier in her career, suffered years and years of being ripped off, beaten up
and pushed around. Maybe that had an effect on how she behaved towards
people. I went to her dressing room and apologized.

She told me that the problem was that I was improvising too much —
adding in little fills and runs on the piano. That’s how I’ve always performed,
ever since the early days of the Elton John Band, when we would shift and
change songs around onstage as the mood took us. It’s part of what I love
about playing live — the music is always a little fluid, not carved in stone;
there’s always room for manoeuvre, the musicians rub off each other and it
keeps things fresh. There’s nothing better onstage than hearing someone in
your band do something you’re not expecting that sounds fantastic in that
moment. You catch their eye and nod and laugh — that’s what it’s all about.
But Tina didn’t think that way. Everything had to be exactly the same every

time; it was all rehearsed down to the slightest movement. That made it
obvious the tour wasn’t going to work, although we made up later: she came
for dinner in Nice, and left a big Tina Turner lipstick kiss in the visitors’
book.

Instead, I arranged another series of live dates with Billy Joel. We’d been
touring together since the early nineties: both of us onstage at the same time,
playing each other’s songs. I thought it was a fantastic idea. We were both
pianists, there was a similarity in our approach to music, although Billy is a
very American, East Coast kind of writer, like Lou Reed or Paul Simon.
They’re all very different, but you could tell they were from New York even
if you knew nothing about them. We played together for years, although it
ended badly, because Billy had a lot of personal problems at the time, and the
biggest one was alcohol. He would wash medication for a chest infection
down with booze in his dressing room, then fall asleep onstage in the middle
of singing ‘Piano Man’. Then he would rouse himself, take a bow and
immediately head back to the hotel bar and stay there until 5 a.m. Eventually,
I suggested that he needed the kind of help that I had got, which didn’t make
me very popular. He said I was being judgemental, but I genuinely wasn’t. I
just couldn’t stand to watch a nice guy do that to himself any longer. But that
was in the future. At first the tours with Billy were great: they were different,
fun to play, audiences loved them, they were really successful.

So I had a lot going on, enough to make me feel like the madness of the
summer was in the past. But the rest of the world apparently had no desire to
stop going mad. The next time we went to Milan, I noticed that everywhere I
went, people on the street would step away from me. When they saw me,
women would cross themselves and men would grab their crotches. Because
of my association with Gianni and Diana, they thought I was cursed, as if I
had the evil eye or something. I couldn’t have got a worse reception if I’d
turned up wearing a shroud and carrying a scythe.

And then, as if a load of Italians carrying on like I was the angel of death
wasn’t crazy enough, something really insane happened. I was in Australia,
where I’d just started touring with Billy in March 1998, when I got a phone
call from David. He was at home at Woodside. He said that the girls who did
the flower arrangements at the house each week had called round to tell him

that they couldn’t work for us anymore because they hadn’t been paid for
over a year and a half. He had rung up John Reid’s office to find out what
was going on and was told that the florists hadn’t been paid because there
wasn’t any money to pay them. Apparently, I was going broke.

oe oe

It didn’t make any sense to me. The official position of John Reid and his
office was that I’d spent it all, and more besides. Don’t get me wrong, I know
exactly what I’m like, and clearly no one would call me the living
embodiment of frugality and thrifty housekeeping — well, with the possible
exception of Gianni. I spent a lot of money — I had four houses, staff, cars, I
bought art and porcelain and designer clothes — and occasionally, I’d get a
stern accountants’ letter telling me to cut back, which I would of course
ignore. But I still didn’t understand how I could be spending more than I
earned. I never stopped working. I played live all the time, long tours, a
hundred or a hundred and fifty shows in the biggest venues you could play,
and the shows always sold out. My recent albums had all gone platinum
around the world, and there was a constant stream of compilations coming
out, that sold so well I wondered who could possibly be buying them. It
seemed inconceivable that anyone who liked ‘Your Song’ or ‘Bennie And
The Jets’ didn’t already own it. The Lion King soundtrack had sold sixteen
million copies, the film had grossed nearly a billion dollars, the musical was
breaking box office records on Broadway.

I felt something wasn’t right, but I had no idea what it might be. I
honestly wasn’t that interested in money. I’ve been extremely lucky and I’ve
earned a lot, but earning a lot was never my motivation. Obviously, I would
be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the fruits of my success, but the mechanics of
how money was made didn’t interest me at all: if they had, I’d have applied
to accountancy school instead of joining Bluesology. I just wanted to play
and make records. I was competitive; I would always ask how many albums
or gig tickets I’d sold, and I’d watch my chart placings like a hawk, but I
never asked how much money I’d earned, never really wanted to examine the
contracts and the royalty cheques. I’ve never been a tax exile: I’m British and
I want to live primarily in Britain. I’m not judging anyone who does it, but I

don’t see the point. You might save money, but I don’t think that’s going to
be a great deal of comfort when you look back on your life and realize you’ve
spent half of it sitting around feeling sorry for yourself in Switzerland,
surrounded by other tax exiles who don’t really want to be there either. And
creatively, I want to be where things are happening in music, and that’s not
Monaco. I’m sure the principality has many things to recommend it, but
when did you last hear of an amazing new band from Monte Carlo?

Besides, I didn’t need to keep a close eye on my finances. As far as I was
concerned, that was what John Reid did for me. It was the basis of a new
management deal we’d done in St-Tropez in the eighties. I paid him 20 per
cent of my gross earnings — an enormous amount by most artists’ standards —
on the understanding he would look after absolutely everything. I think the
phrase used for this arrangement was ‘Rolls-Royce service’. I could live a
blissful life of creativity and pleasure, unencumbered by trifling irritations
like examining tax returns, or looking at bank statements, or reading through
the small print on contracts. It made sense to me because I trusted John
implicitly. We’d been together for what seemed like forever, in one way or
another. It was a relationship founded on something more than a business
arrangement: however close other artists claimed to be to their managers, I
doubted any of them had lost their virginity to them. I trusted him, even
though there were occasionally moments when I wondered if his Rolls-Royce
service might not be in need of an MOT. There was the time a tabloid
newspaper managed to get hold of a load of my financial details, including
one of the letters from the accountants warning me to curb my spending. I
was convinced they had been leaked, but it turned out a guy called Benjamin
Pell had found them by going through the rubbish bins outside John Reid’s
office. They’d just dumped confidential information on the street without
shredding it, which didn’t say a great deal for the firm’s security or how they
were looking after my interests: it certainly seemed their procedures for
dealing with personal data could use a revamp.

And then there was the plan John came up with to sell my master
recordings. It meant that I would get a huge lump sum, and whoever bought
them would get a royalty every time one of my records sold or a song of mine
was played on the radio. It was an enormous deal, because it encompassed

not just everything I’d recorded in the past but all the songs I would record in
the future. John brought in lawyers and music industry figures who told me
what a great idea it was, and I agreed. But the lump sum turned out to be far
less than I’d anticipated and what I thought my master recordings would be
worth. It seemed like everyone had been focusing on the gross figure rather
than the net. After John had taken his commission and the lawyers and tax
had been paid, the money left over really didn’t look like enough to justify
signing away every song I’d ever recorded and ever would record. But I put it
out of my mind. It had still been enough to buy the house in Nice, fill it with
art and furniture and make sure everyone around me benefited. John got his
commission, I decided to pay off the mortgages of a lot of people who
worked for me: my PA Bob Halley, Robert Key, my driver Derek, Bob
Stacey, who’d been my roadie and looked after my wardrobe for decades.
And besides, I didn’t want a big confrontation with John about it.

But now, I felt something clearly wasn’t right. David and I decided to get
some professional advice, from a lawyer called Frank Presland who had
worked for me before. He agreed that something seemed amiss and said I
should have John Reid Enterprises independently audited. I told John, and to
be fair he said he thought it was a good idea and would help in any way he
could.

I was in Australia when the auditors went in, and I started dreading
David’s phone calls, with his daily report from his meetings with Frank
Presland and the accountants. One night he rang, sounding audibly rattled:
Benjamin Pell, the same guy who’d been snooping through the rubbish
outside John Reid’s office, had contacted him, saying that David was being
watched and our phone lines were tapped, and that he should be careful what
he said. That sort of activity was rife in the UK press at the time. How much
worse could this get?

In the end the auditors raised a number of issues with the way various
financial matters had been handled. I was avoiding John’s calls and left it to
Frank Presland to set out what we were disputing. To cut a long and
extremely painful story short, John agreed to settle the potential dispute and,
taking into account his financial situation at the time, he agreed to pay me $5
million.

I couldn’t tell you how I really felt, because how I really felt changed
every minute. I was heartbroken. I felt betrayed — whatever the legal rights
and wrongs, I believed John would put my interests first and warn me if there
was anything I should be concerned about. I was furious, with myself as
much as John. I felt like a fucking idiot, because I’d been so eager to wriggle
out of getting involved with my own business affairs. I felt embarrassed. But
most of all, I felt like a coward. It was crazy: I was still terrified of
confronting him about the situation and of rocking the boat. We’d been
together so long that I couldn’t imagine my world without John in it. From
the moment he’d turned up in the lobby of the Miyako Hotel, our lives had
been completely entwined. We’d been lovers, friends, partners, a team that
had survived everything: fame, drugs, punch-ups, all the stupidity, all the
extremes that came with me becoming Elton John. You name it, it had
happened, and we’d stuck together: Sharon and Beryl. Whenever someone
told me he was aggressive, or complained about his temper, I thought of the
line Don Henley used about The Eagles’ manager, Irving Azoff: ‘he may be
Satan, but he’s our Satan’. And now it was over.

John severed his management contract and gave up his claim on my
future earnings. He closed John Reid Enterprises and retired from
management the following year. And I went back on tour. I had debts to pay
off.

fifteen

One of the many things I love about Bernie is that he’s someone who feels no
compunction about telling you the last album you made together — an album
which sold millions, went Top Ten around the world and spawned a string of
hit singles — was a disaster of unimaginable proportions that required an
immediate crisis meeting to ensure nothing like it ever happened again.
Bernie and I had been on a commercial roll. We’d made two new albums,
Made in England in 1995 and The Big Picture in autumn 1997, and they’d
both done great: gone platinum everywhere from Australia to Switzerland.
But The Big Picture was the problem, as far as Bernie was concerned. He
hated everything about it: the songs, his lyrics, the production, the fact that
we’d recorded it in England and he had to travel from the US for the sessions.
The end result, he opined, as he sat on the terrace of our house in Nice three
years later, was a load of clinical, boring, middle-of-the-road shit. In fact, he
continued, clearly gathering steam, it was the worst album we’d ever made.

I wasn’t a huge fan of The Big Picture myself, but I thought that was
laying it on a bit thick. I certainly didn’t think it was as bad as Leather
Jackets, which in fairness wasn’t saying much. Leather Jackets, you may
remember, wasn’t an album so much as an exercise in trying to make music
while taking so much cocaine you’ve essentially rendered yourself clinically
insane. But even that feeble defence cut no mustard. No, Bernie insisted, The
Big Picture was even worse than that.

I didn’t agree, but Bernie was clearly pissed off: pissed off enough to fly
all the way from his home in America to the south of France to talk about it.
And there definitely was something in what he said. I’d been listening to

Ryan Adams’ album Heartbreaker a lot. He was a classic country rock
singer-songwriter, really — I could imagine him onstage at the Troubadour in
the seventies. But there was a toughness and a freshness about it that did
make The Big Picture sound weirdly dated and staid. Perhaps I had taken my
eye off the ball when it came to my solo albums. Ever since the success of
The Lion King, I’d become more and more interested in film and stage music.
I’d written the soundtrack for a comedy called The Muse, and an instrumental
piece for Women Talking Dirty, a British comedy-drama that David had
produced. I wasn’t writing songs, I was writing proper instrumental scores,
where I had to sit watching the film and come up with thirty or sixty seconds
of music to fit each given scene. I thought it would be boring, but I really
loved it. When you get it right, it’s incredibly inspiring, because you literally
see the effect music can have: a little snatch of it can totally change how a
scene feels, or how it works emotionally.

And Tim Rice and I had done the songs for the DreamWorks animation
film The Road to El Dorado — the movie I’d promised Jeffrey Katzenberg I
would make — then written another stage musical, Aida. That had been much
harder work than The Lion King. There were problems with the set, the
directors and designers were changed, and I stormed out of one of the
Broadway previews midway through the first act, when I realized they hadn’t
changed the arrangements of a couple of the songs as I’d asked them to. If
they weren’t going to listen to me asking nicely, perhaps they would listen to
me stomping up the aisle and out of the theatre. But the hard work — and
indeed the stomping out — paid off. It ran on Broadway for four years, we
won a Grammy, and a Tony Award for Best Score. And I already had another
idea for a musical bubbling. We had been to see Billy Elliot at the Cannes
Film Festival and I’m afraid I made rather a spectacle of myself. I had no idea
what the film was about. I just assumed it was going to be a nice little British
comedy with Julie Walters in it. I was completely unprepared for how much
it was going to affect me emotionally. The scene where his father sees him
dancing in the gym, and realizes that his son is really gifted at something,
even though he doesn’t understand it; the finale, where his dad goes to see
him perform and feels proud and moved; it was just too close to home. It was
as if someone had taken the story of me and my dad and written a happy

ending for it, instead of what had actually happened in real life. I couldn’t
handle it at all. I was so upset that David literally had to help me out of the
cinema. If he hadn’t, there’s every chance I would still be sat there now,
heaving with sobs.

I pulled myself together enough to attend the reception afterwards. We
were talking to the film’s director Stephen Daldry and the writer Lee Hall,
when David mentioned that he thought it would make a good stage musical. I
thought he had a point. So did Lee, although he wanted to know who was
going to write the lyrics. I told him he was: it was his story, he came from
Easington, where the film was set. He complained that he’d never written a
lyric in his life, but said he’d give it a go. I couldn’t believe the stuff he came
back with. Lee was a natural. I never had to change a single word that he’d
written, and, better still, they were completely different from any words I’d
worked with before. His lyrics were tough and political: ‘You think you’re
smart, you Cockney shite, you want to be suspicious — while you were on the
picket line, I went and fucked your missus.’ There were songs about wishing
Margaret Thatcher dead. There was a song that didn’t make it into the final
play called ‘Only Poofs Do Ballet’. It was another completely new challenge.
Perhaps the thought of recording a twenty-seventh Elton John album did
seem a little routine by comparison.

Or maybe there was a way of changing that routine. In Nice, Bernie had
started talking wistfully about the way we made albums in the seventies: how
we used to record things on analogue tape, without too many overdubs, and
with my piano at the front and centre of the sound. It was funny — I’d been
thinking about the same thing. Perhaps it had to do with seeing Cameron
Crowe’s film Almost Famous, which was a kind of love letter to early
seventies rock, personified by a fictional band called Stillwater. One scene
uses ‘Tiny Dancer’: the band start singing along to it on their tour bus. In
fact, that scene turned ‘Tiny Dancer’ into one of my biggest songs overnight.
People forget that when it came out as a single in 1971, it flopped. It didn’t
make the Top Forty in America, and the record label in Britain wouldn’t
release it at all. When it turned up on the soundtrack of Almost Famous, I
think a lot of people had no idea what it was, or who it was by. I think the
film subconsciously put some ideas into my head, about the kind of artist ’'d

been back then, about how my music was made and how it was perceived,
before I became absolutely huge.

It wasn’t that I wanted to turn the clock back. I didn’t have any interest in
doing something retro. I think nostalgia can be a real trap for an artist. When
you reminisce about the good old days, you naturally see it all through rose-
tinted spectacles. In my case in particular, I think that’s forgivable, because I
probably was literally wearing rose-tinted spectacles at the time, with
flashing lights and ostrich feathers attached to them. But if you end up
convincing yourself that everything in the past was better than it is now, you
might as well give up writing music and retire.

What I did like was the idea of recapturing that spirit, that directness, the
same thing that I heard in Ryan Adams’ music: stripping things down, just
focusing on making music rather than worrying whether it was going to be a
hit; going backwards to go forwards.

So that was how we made the next album, Songs from the West Coast. It
came out in October 2001 and got the best reviews I’d had in years. Bernie
wrote powerful, simple, direct lyrics: ‘I Want Love’, ‘Look Ma’, ‘No Hands’,
‘American Triangle’, which was a very harrowing, angry song about the
homophobic murder of Matthew Shephard in Wyoming in 1998. We used a
studio in LA, where we hadn’t recorded for years, and a new producer, Pat
Leonard, who was best known for working with Madonna, but was absolutely
steeped in seventies rock. It was hilarious: he was the guy who co-wrote
‘Like A Prayer’ and ‘La Isla Bonita’, but he was completely obsessed with
Jethro Tull. He’d probably have been happier if Madonna had played a flute
while standing on one leg.

It ended up being a very Californian-sounding record. It’s just different
writing there, rather than making a record in London when it’s pissing with
rain every day. It’s as if the warmth gets into your bones and relaxes you, and
the sunlight somehow glows in the music you make. I loved the results, and
I’ve used the same approach on a lot of albums I’ve made since then:
thinking about what I’d done in the past, taking an idea and developing it
differently. The follow-up, Peachtree Road, was the same: digging into the
country and soul influences on Tumbleweed Connection and songs like ‘Take
Me To The Pilot’. The Captain and the Kid was a sequel to Captain Fantastic

and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, with Bernie writing about what had happened to
us after we went to America in 1970: everything from that stupid double-
decker bus they picked us up from the airport in, to the way our partnership
temporarily broke up. The Diving Board was me playing with just a bassist
and drummer, the same as the original Elton John Band, but doing things I’d
never done before, improvising instrumental passages between the songs. On
Wonderful Crazy Night, I suppose I was thinking a little more of the pop side
of Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player and Goodbye Yellow Brick
Road. I recorded it in 2015, and the news was just relentless misery: I wanted
something light and fun, a sense of escape, lots of bright colours and 12-
string guitar.

"me

Those albums weren’t flops, but they weren’t huge commercial successes
either. It’s always frustrating at first when that happens to an album you think
is brilliant, but you have to take it on the chin. They weren’t commercial
albums, they didn’t have big hit singles built in; The Diving Board in
particular was incredibly dark and depressing. But they were albums I wanted
to make, albums I thought you would be able to play in twenty years’ time
and still feel proud of. Of course, I would have loved it if they’d gone to
Number One, but that wasn’t the most important thing anymore. I’ve had my
moment selling zillions of records, and it was fabulous, but from the second it
began, I realized it wouldn’t last forever. If you believe it will, you can end
up in terrible trouble. I honestly think that’s one of the things that tipped
Michael Jackson over the edge: he was convinced he could make an album
bigger than Thriller, and was crushed every time it didn’t happen.

Just before we started working on The Captain and the Kid, I got asked to
do a residency at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. They had built a huge new
theatre, the Colosseum. Celine Dion was playing there, and they wanted me
to do a show as well. My immediate thought was that I didn’t want to do it. In
my head, Las Vegas was still linked to the cabaret circuit I’d escaped in
1967. It was The Rat Pack and Donny and Marie Osmond. It was the Elvis
I’d met in 1976 — seven years on the Vegas strip visibly hadn’t done him
much good — and performers in tuxedos talking to the audience: “You know,

one of the wonderful things about showbiz...’ But then I started wondering if
it was possible to do something completely different with a Vegas show. The
photographer and director David LaChapelle had directed a great video for
one of the singles from Songs from the West Coast, “This Train Don’t Stop
There Anymore’. It featured Justin Timberlake lip-synching to the song,
dressed as me backstage in the seventies, complete with a John Reid figure in
the background, beating up a reporter and knocking a cop’s hat off. I loved it
and contacted him about getting involved with designing a whole show. I told
him to do whatever he wanted, let his imagination run riot, be as outrageous
as he wanted to be.

If you know anything at all about David’s work, you’|l realize this isn’t a
sentence you say to him lightly. He’s brilliant, but at that stage in his career
he couldn’t take a holiday snap of someone without first getting them to dress
up as Jesus and stand on top of a giant stuffed flamingo surrounded by neon
signs and muscular boys in snakeskin jockstraps. This is a man who
photographed Naomi Campbell as a topless wrestler stamping on a man’s
face in stiletto-heeled boots, while a crowd of masked men with dwarfism
looked on. One of his fashion shoots featured an immaculately dressed model
standing next to the corpse of a woman who’d been killed by an air-
conditioning unit falling from a window, her head splattered into a bloody
mess on the pavement. He somehow managed to convince Courtney Love to
pose as Mary Magdalene, with what looked like Kurt Cobain’s dead body
draped over her knees. For my Vegas show, he designed a set full of neon
signs and inflatable bananas and hot dogs and lipsticks: you didn’t have to
have a filthy imagination to notice that every last one of them looked
remarkably like an erect penis. He directed a succession of videos for each
song, arty and wild and unapologetically gay. There was a reconstruction of
my suicide bid back in Furlong Road in the sixties — it was quite literally a
dramatization in so far as it made my suicide bid look hugely dramatic rather
than pathetic in the extreme. There were blue teddy bears ice-skating and
feeding homoerotic angels honey. There were films of people sniffing
cocaine off a boy’s naked bum. There was a scene which featured the
transsexual model Amanda Lepore naked, in an electric chair, with sparks
flying out of her vagina. The show was called The Red Piano, an innocuous

enough title given what it actually contained.

I thought it was all confirmation that David LaChapelle was a genius. I
knew we’d got it right when I spotted a few people walking out in disgust,
and when my mother told me she hated it. She came to the first night,
expressed her aversion to what was happening onstage by theatrically putting
on a pair of dark glasses after about five minutes, then came backstage
afterwards with a face like thunder, telling everyone that it was so awful it
was going to end my career overnight. Sam Taylor-Wood was there too —
David and I knew her through the art world. I loved Sam’s photography: I
had bought her version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper and got her
to direct a video for another single off Songs from the West Coast, ‘I Want
Love’. She couldn’t believe my mum’s reaction — ‘I felt like taking my shoe
off,’ she said, ‘and hitting her over the head with it’ — but in fairness, she
didn’t know my mum that well. The drizzle of criticism that had started in the
mid-seventies had continued pretty much unabated ever since: the woman
didn’t like anything. I’d got used to tuning it out, or laughing it off, but other
people seemed to get a shock when they came into contact with it.

Some people hated The Red Piano because they hadn’t got what they
expected, which was the whole point. But what they expected proved they
hadn’t been paying much attention to the rest of my career. The whole thing
had been founded on live performances that were outrageous and over-the-
top. The Vegas residency worked because it fitted my character, and the way
I’d presented myself in the past. It wasn’t just a load of shocking visuals
grafted on for effect, it was another form of going backwards to go forwards,
an updated version of the seventies shows where I’d been introduced onstage
by famous porn stars and brought Divine out in full drag. Despite the
occasional angry letter to the management and Mum’s dire imprecations, they
were enormously successful shows, and I think they might have been
groundbreaking, too. Maybe they changed the image of Las Vegas a little,
made it seem less showbiz, a bit more edgy; it became a place where Lady
Gaga or Britney Spears or Bruno Mars could perform without anyone raising
an eyebrow.

In Britain, the law around gay partnerships was changing. At the end of 2005
it became legal for same-sex couples to enter into civil partnerships:
marriages in all but name, a couple of minor technical differences aside.
David and I talked about it and decided we wanted to be first in line. We’d
been together for over ten years, and it was an incredibly important piece of
legislation for gay couples. As a result of AIDS, I’d seen so many people lose
their partner, then discover they had no legal rights whatsoever as a couple.
Their late boyfriend’s family would come steaming in, cut them out of the
equation entirely — out of greed, or because they never liked the fact that their
son or brother was gay — and they would lose everything. Although we had
discussed it very soberly and sensibly, I still managed to spring a surprise on
David. I proposed to him in the middle of a dinner party we were hosting for
the Scissor Sisters at Woodside. I did it properly and got down on one knee.
Even though I knew he would say yes, it was still a really lovely moment. We
had the rings we’d bought for each other in Paris — the weekend I thought I
could remain incognito while wearing the entire Versace spring/summer
menswear collection at once — re-blessed.

The new law came in at the start of December, and there was a statutory
fifteen-day waiting period. The first day we could legally become civil
partners was 21 December. There was a lot to do. The ceremony itself was to
be held at the Guildhall in Windsor, the same place Prince Charles got
married to Camilla Parker Bowles. That was going to be a private, intimate
event: just me and David, Mum and Derf, David’s parents, our dog Arthur,
Ingrid and Sandy and our friends Jay Jopling and Sam Taylor-Wood.

The original idea was to have a huge reception in the evening at
Pinewood Studios, but the planner involved somehow managed to come back
with a budget that even I thought was ridiculous, a not unimpressive feat in
itself. I can remember looking at it and thinking, ‘I could go mad in the Old
Masters department of Sotheby’s for that kind of money.’ We couldn’t find
anywhere else to host our reception — it was just before Christmas,
everywhere was already booked — so we decided to have the party at
Woodside. We erected three interlinked marquees in the grounds: the first
was a reception room, the second a dining room and the third housed a huge
dance floor. There was going to be live entertainment: James Blunt was going

to sing, and so was Joss Stone. There were six hundred guests, and David
insisted on doing the seating plans himself. He was really meticulous. One of
his pet hates is the kind of party where everyone is thrown together at random
and you end up sitting next to a complete stranger. Besides, we needed to
exercise a degree of caution, because the guest list was about as eclectic as it
was possible to get: there were people invited from absolutely every area of
our lives. I was quite proud of the fact that we were having a party where
members of the Royal Family had been invited alongside a selection of star
performers from the gay porn studio BelAmi, but it seemed perhaps best to
ensure they weren’t actually sitting together. So David very carefully
arranged everything around what he called tribes: there was a table for the
sports stars who were coming, a table for people from the fashion world, a
table for the former Beatles and their associates. And then I put my own
personal mark on his painstaking efforts by ruining them.

There is a popular theory among psychologists that a person cursed with
an addictive personality can get addicted to virtually anything. It was a theory
I spent a lot of the early noughties attempting to prove with the aid of a paper
shredder we’d bought for the office at Woodside. I’m not sure how my
obsession with it began. Partly it was founded on a need for security: we had,
after all, had our bank statements plastered all over the front pages of the
press because some idiot in John Reid’s office had thrown them out intact.
But mostly it was because there’s something incredibly, indefinably
satisfying about using a paper shredder: the sound it makes, the sight of the
paper slowly vanishing into it, the tendrils of shredded paper emerging from
the other end. I loved it. I could sit in a room filled with priceless works of art
and find none of them as compelling as the sight of an old tour itinerary being
decimated.

But if I don’t know where my obsession began, I can tell you exactly
when it ended. It was about two minutes after I saw the state of the room in
which David was working on the seating plan — there were sheets of paper all
over the place — and decided that here was a great opportunity both to help
him out by tidying up a bit and to feed my burgeoning passion for turning old
documents into confetti. I can’t remember how many pages of David’s
meticulously arranged seating plan I managed to feed through the shredder

before he wandered back into the room and started shouting. I’d never heard
him shout like that in my life: David was never a man for volcanic explosions
of temper, but it appeared that over the course of our twelve years together,
he’d been quietly taking notes from a master of the art and waiting for the
right moment to put what he’d learned into action. He began wildly depicting
scenes of unmanageable social disaster, in which the BelAmi stars ended up
discussing their work on Boys Like It Big 2 with his mum or my auntie Win.
He was shouting so loudly you could hear him all over the house. You could
certainly hear him very clearly upstairs in our bedroom. I know this for a fact
because that’s where I decided to hide, carefully locking the door behind me
as a precaution. I didn’t really think he was going to smash the paper
shredder over my head, but all the same, the noise coming from downstairs
suggested it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility.

But everything else in the run-up to the ceremony went remarkably
smoothly. Our friend Patrick Cox threw us an incredible joint stag party at a
Soho gay club called Too 2 Much. It was hilarious, a full cabaret
performance. Paul O’Grady hosted the whole thing and sang a duet with
Janet Street-Porter. Sir lan McKellen came dressed as Widow Twankey.
Bryan Adams sang and Sam Taylor-Wood did a version of ‘Love To Love
You Baby’. There were video messages from Elizabeth Taylor and Bill
Clinton in between performances by the famous New York drag act Kiki and
Herb and Eric McCormack, who played Will in Will and Grace, and was an
old schoolfriend of David’s back in Ontario. Jake Shears from the Scissor
Sisters got so overexcited he ended up taking all his clothes off and
demonstrating the pole-dancing skills he’d learned working in New York
strip clubs before the band became successful. It was quite a night.

On the morning of the ceremony we woke up to a beautiful winter’s day,
sunny and crisp. There was a sort of magical Christmas Morning atmosphere
in the house, amid all the bustle. We had guests staying with us: David’s
family had arrived from Canada; my old schoolfriend Keith Francis had
flown all the way from Australia with his wife. Outside, there were people
putting finishing touches to the marquees and checking the fairy lights in the
trees. The night before, we had watched the TV news about the first civil
partnerships to take place in Northern Ireland — there was a _ shorter

registration period there — and how the couples had faced protests outside
their ceremonies, evangelical Christians bellowing at them about ‘sodomite
propaganda’, people throwing flour bombs and eggs. I was genuinely worried
— if that was what was happening to everyday people, what kind of reception
would a really famous gay couple get? David assured me everything would
be OK: the police were fully aware of the threat and had set up an area for
protesters, where they couldn’t ruin the day. But now, the news from
Windsor was that there were crowds lining the streets and a party
atmosphere. No one wanted to attack us: instead, people had turned up with
banners and cakes and presents for us. There were news trucks from CNN
and the BBC parked outside, reporters doing pieces to camera.

I turned the TV off and told David not to watch anything either. I just
wanted us to stay in the moment, together, without any distractions. I’d been
married before, of course, but this was different. I was truly being myself,
being allowed to express my love for another man in a way that would have
seemed beyond comprehension when I realized I was gay, or when I first
came out in Rolling Stone — partly because no one ever talked about gay
marriage or civil partnerships in 1976, and partly because, back then, I
seemed no more capable of ending up in a long-term relationship than I did
of flying to Mars. And yet here we were. It felt intense: not just personal, but
historic, too, like we were part of the world changing for the better. I was as
happy as I could ever remember being.

And that was the moment my mother turned up, in character as a raving
sociopath.

ee

The first sign that there was something wrong was when she wouldn’t get out
of the car. She and Derf had arrived at Woodside as planned, but then point-
blank refused to come into the house. Despite various entreaties to join us,
they just sat there, stony-faced. David’s family had to troop out to say hello
through the car window. What the fuck was the matter with her? I didn’t get a
chance to ask. The security arrangements for the ceremony were that
everyone was supposed to be travelling together to the Guildhall in a convoy
of cars. But Mum announced that she wouldn’t be joining the convoy, and

nor would she be coming to the private lunch we were having at Woodside
after the civil partnership, and suddenly drove off.

Oh, great. The most important day of my life and one of Mum’s moods
appeared to be upon us, the ones I’d lived in terror of when I was young. I’d
inherited some of her capacity to sulk myself. The difference was that I
snapped out of it quickly: I would realize what I was doing — shit, I’m not just
behaving like an idiot, I’m behaving like my mother — and rush around
issuing desperate apologies to everyone concerned. Mum never snapped out
of it, never seemed contrite, never appeared to think she was in the wrong or
behaving badly. The best you could hope for was a terrible argument — in
which, as ever, she had to have the last word — followed by an awkward
smoothing over, a shaky truce that lasted until she went off again. As the
years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic, awesome level. She was the
Cecil B. DeMille of bad moods, the Tolstoy of taking a huff. I’m
exaggerating only slightly. We’re talking about a woman who didn’t speak to
her own sister for ten years as a result of an argument over whether Auntie
Win had put skimmed milk in her tea or not. A woman whose dedication to
sulking was such that, at its height, it literally caused her to pack her entire
life up and leave the country. It happened in the eighties; she fell out with me
and one of Derf’s sons from his first marriage at the same time and, as a
result, emigrated to Menorca. She would rather move to a foreign country
than back down or apologize. There’s not an enormous amount of point in
trying to reason with someone like that.

I watched her car disappear down the drive and found myself wishing she
was in Menorca now. Or on the moon. Anywhere but heading to my civil
partnership ceremony, which I had a terrible feeling she was going to try her
best to stink up. I hadn’t wanted her there in the first place. I had a nagging
fear that she was going to do something like this, just as I had when I got
married to Renate. That was one of the reasons I’d insisted on getting married
so quickly, in Australia — I hadn’t wanted Mum there. But I had changed my
mind a few weeks beforehand, reasoning that not even Mum was crazy
enough to pull a stunt like this. It appeared I was wrong.

She didn’t — couldn’t — spoil the day. It was too magical, with the crowds
outside the Guildhall cheering, and later, the cars arriving at Woodside and

what seemed like everyone I knew and loved climbing out to join the party,
like your life flashing before your eyes in the loveliest of circumstances:
Graham Taylor and Muff and Zena Winwood, Ringo Starr and George
Martin, Tony King and Billie Jean King. But, in fairness to Mum, she
absolutely gave it her best shot. When David and I exchanged our vows, she
started talking, very loudly, over the top of us: rattling on about how she
didn’t like the venue and how she couldn’t imagine getting married in a place
like this. When the time came for the witnesses to sign the civil partnership
licence, she signed her name, snapped, ‘It’s done, then,’ slammed the pen
down and stormed off. It was bizarre; my mood kept switching from
complete euphoria to wild panic at what she was going to do next. Worse, I
couldn’t do anything about it. I knew from experience that trying to talk to
her would just be lighting the blue touchpaper on a huge row that would ruin
everything, and, better still, could quite easily take place in front of the
world’s media or six hundred guests. I wasn’t keen on the coverage of
Britain’s most high-profile civil partnership featuring a section where Elton
John and his mother entertained the nation by screaming at each other on the
steps of the Windsor Guildhall.

At the party in the evening, she tutted and groaned and rolled her eyes
during the speeches. She complained about the seating arrangements:
apparently she wasn’t close enough to me and David — ‘you might as well
have stuck me in Siberia’ — although it was hard to see how she could have
been any closer without actually sitting in our laps. I avoided her as the
evening wore on, which was easy — there were so many friends to speak to,
who wanted to wish us well. But out of the corner of my eye I could see a
steady stream of people going to speak to her, then coming away very
quickly, wearing extremely long faces. She was vile to everyone, no matter
how innocuous their attempts at conversation. Jay Jopling made the fatal
mistake of saying to her, ‘Isn’t this a lovely day?’ which apparently counted
as merciless provocation. ‘I’m glad you fucking well think so,’ snapped Mum
in response. Tony King went to say hello — he’d known Mum and Derf for
years — and, for his trouble, was informed that he was looking old. At one
point, Sharon Osbourne sidled up to me as I was looking on.

‘I know she’s your mother,’ she muttered, “but I want to kill her.’

I didn’t find out what had provoked all this until much later. She told the
press she was upset because she’d been told she wasn’t allowed in any of the
photographs because she wasn’t wearing a hat, which was just nonsense.
David’s mum had wanted a hat for the ceremony, he’d offered to take her and
my mum shopping, but my mum had said she didn’t want one. Fairly
obviously this wasn’t a problem at all, given that she was in all the family
photographs. It turned out that David’s parents knew what the problem was
with her all along, but they didn’t tell us before the ceremony, because they
didn’t want to upset us. They had rung her as soon as they arrived in the UK,
having always got on well with Mum and Derf. They’d even gone on
holidays together. My mother had told them they all had to work together to
stop the civil partnership going ahead. She didn’t approve of two men
‘getting married’, as she put it. She thought it was wrong that gay couples
should be treated in the same way as straight couples. Everyone she had
spoken to was horrified by the very idea. It was going to hurt my career.
David’s mum told her she was nuts, that their kids were doing something
amazing and she should support them. My mother put the phone down on
her.

She repeated the same line to me a couple of years later, in the middle of
a blazing row. It didn’t make sense. Mum had always been incredibly hard
work, but she had never been homophobic. She was supportive when I told
her I was gay and she had been unflappable when the press cornered her after
I came out in Rolling Stone, telling them she thought I was brave and she
didn’t care if I was gay or straight. Why would she suddenly decide she had a
problem with my sexuality thirty years later? Maybe she had all along, and
had somehow managed to suppress it until now. As ever, I think the real
problem was that she hated anyone being closer to me than she was. She’d
been cold towards most of my boyfriends, and cold towards Renate, but this
was on a different level. She knew the boyfriends were never going to turn
into a long-term relationship: I was too erratic, because of all the coke I was
taking. Even though I married Renate, Mum believed deep down it wasn’t
going to last, because she knew I was gay. But now I was sober and settled
with a man I was deeply in love with. I’d found a life partner, and the civil
partnership underlined that. She couldn’t cope with the thought of the

umbilical cord finally being cut: that idea had become so all-consuming that
she couldn’t see past it, didn’t care about anything else, including the fact that
I was finally happy.

Well, that was her tough luck. I was finally happy, and I wasn’t going to
change that for anybody, no matter how many moods they took. When she
realized that, perhaps she would come round.

ee

I had plenty to be happy about. Not just in my personal life: between the
Vegas shows, Billy Elliot and the new albums, I was enjoying making music
so much that my enthusiasm became infectious. David started getting
interested in the stuff that had inspired me at the start of my career, artists and
albums that he was a little too young to have experienced first-hand. He
would make up iPod playlists of things I recommended to him. He took them
with him to play in our hotel room when we went on holiday to South Africa,
with our friends Ingrid and Sandy.

If you want an example of how a deep, lifelong friendship can be forged
from the most unpromising start, Ingrid and I were it. I’d first met her when
she was writing a profile about me for Interview magazine, which she edited.
Or rather, I’d gone out of my way to avoid meeting her when she was writing
a profile about me: I was in a foul mood and cancelled our interview. She
rang back and told me she was coming anyway. I told her not to bother. She
told me she was coming anyway. I told her to fuck off. She put the phone
down and materialized at my hotel room door in what seemed like a matter of
minutes. A matter of minutes later, I had fallen in love with her. Ingrid had
balls. Ingrid had opinions. And Ingrid’s opinions were worth listening to,
because Ingrid was clearly as smart as hell. She’d been made the editor of
Artforum magazine when she was twenty-seven and seemed to know
everything there was to know about — and everyone there was to know in —
the worlds of art and fashion. She took no shit from anybody, including, it
had now become apparent, me. She was incredibly funny. By the end of the
afternoon, she not only had her interview, she had a commitment from me to
write a column for her magazine, and I had the same feeling I had when I met
Gianni Versace for the first time: if he had seemed like my long-lost brother,

Ingrid was my missing sister. We rang each other all the time; I loved talking
to her, partly because she was a fabulous gossip, partly because whenever
you spoke to her you learned something, but mostly because she always told
you the truth, even if the truth wasn’t what you wanted to hear.

Ingrid was originally from South Africa but had left when she was a kid.
Her mother was in danger of being arrested for her involvement in the anti-
apartheid movement, so the family moved first to Edinburgh then New York.
But Ingrid loved South Africa, which is how she and Sandy ended up
accompanying us on the holiday. One evening we were getting ready for
dinner, with one of David’s early seventies iPod playlists providing the
soundtrack. While he was in the shower, ‘Back To The Island’ by Leon
Russell came on. It caught me completely off guard. It’s a beautiful song, but
it’s incredibly sad: about loss and regret and time passing. I sat on the bed
and I started to cry. Leon coming into the dressing room at the Troubadour,
the tours I did opening for him, and Eric Clapton, and Poco: it all suddenly
seemed a very long time ago. I’d played this song over and over when I lived
on Tower Grove Drive. I could still see it in my mind’s eye. The dark wood
of the interior; the suede on the master bedroom’s walls; the way the sunlight
fell on the swimming pool in the morning. A crowd of people stumbling
through the front door after the Whiskey or the Rainbow or Le Restaurant
finally threw us out; the clouds of heady Californian grass and the glasses
filled with bourbon, and the blue eyes of a guy I lured up to the games room,
who said he was straight but whose smile suggested he was persuadable.
Dusty Springfield arriving back after a night touring the city’s gay clubs and
falling out of the car onto the drive. The afternoon Tony King and I tried
mescaline and ended up with the screaming horrors, after someone in our
party raided the kitchen and decided, in their altered state, that they’d invent a
new kind of Bloody Mary, with a lump of raw liver on the side of the glass.
Just the sight of it set us off.

But my memories of LA in the seventies were filled with ghosts. All the
old Hollywood legends I’d gone out of my way to meet there had died of old
age. So had Ray Charles. I’d been the last person to record a song with him,
for an album of duets, thirty-four years after he’d invited me to appear on
American television for the first time. We sang ‘Sorry Seems To Be The

Hardest Word’, sitting down — he was too weak to stand. I asked the
engineers for a copy of the tape, not so much for the music, but just to have a
record of us chatting between takes. I suppose I wanted proof that it had
really happened, that a kid who’d dreamed of being Ray Charles actually
ended up talking to him like a friend. But there were other ghosts, too, people
who didn’t die of old age: people who AIDS took young, people who’d drunk
or drugged themselves to death. People who’d died in accidents, people
who’d been killed, people who’d died of the things that kill you in your fifties
and sixties if you’re unlucky. Dee Murray, my old bass player. Doug Weston,
who ran the Troubadour. Bill Graham. Gus Dudgeon. John Lennon, George
Harrison and Harry Nilsson. Keith Moon and Dusty Springfield. Endless
boys I'd fallen in love with, or thought I’d fallen in love with, on the dance
floor at the After Dark.

When he came back from the bathroom and saw me in tears, David’s face
fell.

‘Oh God,’ he sighed, ‘what’s the matter?’

By now bitterly experienced in dealing with my moods, his immediate
thought was that I didn’t like some minor aspect of the holiday and was going
to start yelling about how we had to leave at once. I said it was nothing like
that: I was just thinking about the past. On the iPod, Leon was still singing:
‘Well all the fun has died, it’s raining in my heart, I know down in my soul
I’m really going to miss you’. God, that man could sing. What had happened
to him? I hadn’t heard anyone mention his name in years. I went to the phone
and called my friend Johnny Barbis in LA and asked him if he could track
Leon down. He came back with a Nashville number. I called it, and a voice
answered. It sounded more gravelly than I remembered, but it was definitely
him — that same Oklahoma drawl. I asked how he was. He said he was in bed,
watching Days of Our Lives on TV: ‘I’m all right. Just about making ends
meet.’ That was one way of putting it. Leon had made some bad business
decisions, he had a lot of ex-wives, and times had changed. Now he was
touring anywhere that would have him. One of the finest musicians and
songwriters in the world, and he was playing sports bars and pubs, beer
festivals and motorbike conventions, towns I’d never heard of in Missouri
and Connecticut. I told him I was in the middle of nowhere in Africa, and I

was listening to his music and thinking about the past. I thanked him for
everything he’d done for me and told him how important his music was in
my life. He sounded genuinely touched.

‘Well, that’s real nice of you,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much.’

After we’d finished talking, I put the phone down and looked at it.
Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t explain it, but I just knew that wasn’t why
I had called him. I picked the phone up and dialled his number again. He
laughed when he picked up.

‘My God, forty-five years I don’t hear from you and now twice in ten
minutes?’

I asked him if he wanted to make an album, both of us, together. There
was a long silence.

‘Are you serious?’ he said. ‘Do you think I can do it?’ He sighed. ‘I’m
really old.’

I told him I was pretty old, too, and if I could, he could, if he’d like to.

He laughed again. “The hell I would — yeah.’

It wasn’t an act of charity. It was more pure indulgence for me: if you’d
told me in 1970 that I’d one day make a record with Leon Russell I would
have laughed at you. And it wasn’t always easy. He had mentioned having
some health issues on the phone, but I didn’t realize how sick Leon was until
he arrived at the studio in LA. He looked like the ailing patriarch in a
Tennessee Williams play: a long white beard, dark glasses and a cane. He
struggled to walk. He would sit in a La-Z-Boy recliner in the studio for a
couple of hours a day and sing and play. That was all he could manage, but
what he did in those two hours was incredible. There were moments when I
wondered if his contributions to the album were going to be released
posthumously. One day, his nose started running: it was fluid leaking from
his brain. He was rushed into hospital for surgery and treated for heart failure
and pneumonia while he was there.

But we finished the record. We called it The Union and it went Top Five
in the US. We toured together in the autumn of 2010, playing 15,000-seat
arenas, places Leon said he’d never seen the inside of in decades. Some
nights he had to come onstage in a wheelchair, but it didn’t make any
difference to how he sounded. He killed it every time.

And Leon finally got his due as a result of that album. He got a new
record deal and was made a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I
was so pleased for him that I momentarily forgot my vow never to darken its
doors again, and offered to give his induction speech. He made money and
bought himself a new bus and toured around the world in bigger and better
venues than he’d played for years. He was touring until the day he died in
2016. If you didn’t see him, I’m sorry: you missed out. Leon Russell was the
greatest.

sixteen

The first time it happened was in South Africa in 2009, at a drop-in centre for
kids living with HIV and its after-effects. It was in the centre of Soweto, a
place where orphaned children and kids who’d been forced to step up and
become the head of their household could go and get things they needed,
whether that was a hot meal, or counselling, or just help with their
homework. We were visiting it because it was funded by the Elton John
AIDS Foundation and they had put on a presentation for us: the women who
ran the place and the children who benefited from it, explaining how it
worked. A small boy wearing the kind of brightly patterned shirt that Nelson
Mandela had made famous presented me with a little spoon, a symbol of the
South African sugar industry. But then he wouldn’t go back and sit with the
other kids. I don’t know why — he didn’t have a clue who I was — but he just
seemed to take a shine to me. He was called Noosa, and he stuck to my side
for the rest of the visit. I held his hand and pulled faces and made him laugh.
He was adorable. I wondered what his life in the outside world might be like:
God, the horror stories you heard in South Africa about how AIDS had
devastated lives that were no picnic to start off with. Where was he going
when he left here? Back to what? But looking at him, I realized I felt
something that wasn’t just pity or fondness. There was a flicker of something
else there, something that was more powerful than just ‘awww’, something I
couldn’t quite put my finger on. I wandered over to David.

‘This boy’s just wonderful,’ I said. ‘He’s an orphan. Maybe he needs
support. What do you think?’

David looked completely baffled. He had broached the subject of starting

a family before — the idea of a gay couple adopting children was nothing like
as anomalous as it had once been. But every time he mentioned the idea, I
had presented him with a list of objections so long it just wore him into
submission.

I adored kids. I’ve got umpteen godsons and goddaughters — some of
them are famous, like Sean Lennon and Brooklyn and Romeo Beckham, and
some of them aren’t known at all, like the son of my AA sponsor — and I love
them very much. But having your own children was a different matter
entirely. I was too old. Too set in my ways. Too absent — always off on tour.
Too keen on porcelain and photographs and modern art, none of which
respond well to being knocked over, or drawn on with crayon, or smeared
with Marmite, or any of the other things small children are famously keen on
doing. Too busy to find the room in my life that was clearly needed to be a
parent. I wasn’t being grumpy, I was just being honest. But really, my own
childhood was at the root of every objection. Bringing up children was an
incredible challenge, and I knew from personal experience how awful it was
if you fucked that challenge up. You obviously want to believe you wouldn’t
make the same mistakes as your own mum and dad, but what if you did? I
couldn’t live with the thought of making my own children as miserable as I
had been.

All those protests, and now here I was suggesting we look into adopting
an orphan from Soweto. No wonder David looked baffled; I was too. What
the hell was going on? I had no idea, but something had definitely just
happened, completely out of my control. It was almost as if a real paternal
instinct had finally kicked in in my sixties, the same way my libido had
unexpectedly arrived, years after everyone else’s, when I was twenty-one.

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. We made some enquiries and quickly
found out that the little boy was in a relatively good place. He lived with his
grandmother and sister and another relation, and they were well looked after,
a tight-knit family — so tight-knit that when Noosa attached himself to me, his
sister had burst into tears, thinking we were going to take him away from her.
That settled it. We wouldn’t help him at all by uprooting him from his culture
and his own identity and bringing him to the UK: it was better to invest in his
future in his own country. I saw him a few more times, when I went back to

South Africa to perform or to do work with the AIDS Foundation, and he was
still completely adorable, and clearly very happy.

It was an odd incident, but I put it out of my mind, knowing that we had
done the right thing. I retreated back to my usual position regarding children.
I don’t think either of us brought up the subject again. And then, that same
year, we went to Ukraine.

The orphanage was in Donetsk, a big industrial city in the centre of the
country. It was specifically for children aged one to eleven, a place where
they could be monitored to see if they developed HIV — not every child born
to a mother with HIV tests positive. If they did, they got antiretroviral
treatment, care and support. We were being shown round, handing out food,
nappies and schoolbooks — not lavish gifts; stuff they really, really needed —
to the care workers and the kids. I played ‘Circle Of Life’ for them, on a
piano I’d donated. Just afterwards, a tiny boy ran straight over to me, and I
picked him up and hugged him. They told me he was called Lev. He was
fourteen months old but looked younger — he was so small. His story was
horrendous. His father was a convicted murderer who’d strangled a teenage
girl. His mother was HIV positive, a chronic alcoholic who had tuberculosis
and couldn’t look after her children. They didn’t know whether he had HIV
yet, although he had an older half-brother called Artem who had tested
positive for the disease. Lev had blond hair and brown eyes, and a grin that
seemed completely at odds with his surroundings and with the hand that life
had dealt him. I just melted every time he smiled at me.

I didn’t put him down for the rest of the time we were there. Whatever
had happened in Soweto happened again, only more intensely: there was an
immediate bond, some kind of very powerful connection. I was in a raw
emotional state anyway. A few days before, Guy Babylon, who’d played
keyboards in my band for eleven years, had suddenly died. He was only fifty-
two, he seemed perfectly fit and healthy but had a heart attack while
Swimming. It was a reminder that you only get so long, that you never know
what’s around the corner. Maybe that gave me some real clarity about what
was important to me about life. Why try and deny how you really feel, deep
down, about something as fundamental as fatherhood?

The rest of the party moved on and I stayed behind in the room, playing

with Lev. I didn’t feel I could leave. Eventually David came back to see
where I was. As soon as he walked into the room, I started gushing.

‘This little boy is remarkable, he’s called Lev, he’s an orphan. He found
me, I didn’t find him. I think this is a calling. I think the universe is sending
us a message, and we should adopt him.’

David looked even more stunned than he had in Soweto. Clearly, he
hadn’t expected his simple enquiry of ‘what are you doing?’ to be answered
with a load of stuff about higher callings and messages from the universe.
But he could see I was deadly serious. He told me to slow down and keep
things low-key for the moment — we had to find out more about Lev’s
situation, about his family, about whether he could leave the orphanage
before they knew whether or not he was HIV positive.

I carried Lev around for the rest of the day. I was still holding him when
we were ushered outside for a press conference in a makeshift marquee. I
deposited him in David’s lap while I answered the reporters’ questions. The
last one was about the fact that I’d said I never wanted children: had seeing
kids that needed homes in the orphanage changed my mind? Here was a
perfect opportunity for me to demonstrate that I’d fully grasped what David
had said about the need to keep any thoughts I had on Lev’s future low-key.
Instead, I blurted out that my mind had changed, that the little boy sitting
with David in the front row had stolen our hearts, and that I would love to
adopt him and his brother if it was possible.

a. |

You may recall a few chapters ago that I explained why I’m pleased I became
famous in an era before record companies and managers forced artists to get
media training and watch what they say: that I’m proud of always giving
straight answers and speaking my mind. Perhaps now I should qualify that
statement by noting that there are a couple of points in my career where
media training has suddenly seemed like a very good idea indeed, where I’ve
wished that, for once in my life, I just answered a question by saying
something unbelievably boring and bland and evasive, rather than telling the
truth. This was definitely one of those points. I realized I shouldn’t have said
it as soon as it came out of my mouth, not least because I noticed David

lower his head, close his eyes and mutter something that looked very much
like the words ‘oh shit’.

“That comment,’ he complained, as we were driven back to the airport, ‘is
going to go everywhere, in minutes.’

He was right. By the time we landed in Britain, his BlackBerry was
packed with texts and voice messages from friends, congratulating us on our
wonderful news, which meant it had already hit the media. Certain sections
of the British press couldn’t have reacted more negatively if I’d said I
harboured a pathological hatred for children and was planning on personally
burning down the Donetsk orphanage later that night. The Daily Mail and the
Sun immediately dispatched journalists to Ukraine. One got hold of a
government minister who said that adoption was impossible, because we
were a gay couple and, besides, I was too old. Another visited Lev’s mother,
bought her vodka and took her to the orphanage for a photo opportunity,
which automatically set any adoption process back by a year: in order for a
child to become a ward of state, they had to have been in an orphanage for
twelve months without a visit from any family member. The journalist either
didn’t know, or didn’t care — they hadn’t thought about it. There was
something really horrible, if inevitable, about the way the story became
entirely about me and David, and not the children involved. It was hard not to
think that if I hadn’t said anything at the press conference, none of this would
have happened. Perhaps it would have made no difference at all. But we
would never know.

We kept trying, looking at the logistics of adoption, but it became obvious
that it wouldn’t work. We could have appealed to the European Court of
Justice, but there didn’t seem to be much point — Ukraine wasn’t part of the
EU. We had contacted a psychologist, asking about the emotional process of
introducing kids who’d lived in an orphanage into a family, and something he
said really brought us up short. He told us he believed any child who had
been in an orphanage for longer than eighteen months would be irreversibly
psychologically damaged. They wouldn’t have experienced real nurturing,
they wouldn’t have been picked up and held and loved enough, and that
would affect them in a way they would never recover from. So we gave up
trying to find a way to adopt Lev and Artem and, working with a charity in

Ukraine, we concentrated on getting them out of there before their eighteen
months was up. Their mother died, and their father went back to prison, but
they had a relatively young grandmother and it was arranged that they should
go and live with her.

Through the charity, we quietly provided them with financial support. We
were advised to keep it anonymous — so anonymous that not even Lev and
Artem’s grandmother would know we were helping — because of the way the
media had descended on them: if they found out I was their benefactor, there
was a chance they would never leave the kids alone. The help we gave wasn’t
extravagant Elton John-scale support, which would have served only to
isolate them more. But we made sure they had enough of the things that the
charity told us they needed: decent furniture, food, books for school, legal
support. When the Russians invaded that part of Ukraine, we worked with the
same charity that had funded the orphanage to evacuate them to Kiev. We’ll
always keep an eye on them.

Last year, when I went back to Ukraine with the AIDS Foundation, I saw
Lev and Artem. They walked into the room in their matching hoodies and we
hugged and cried and talked and talked. So much time had passed. Lev was
grown up now. He was a funny, cheeky, charming ten-year-old. But in one
way, nothing had changed at all: I still felt exactly the same connection to
him as I had the day I first met him. I still wished we could have adopted
him. But I knew his grandmother had done a great job.

a. |

We’d tried and failed to become adoptive parents. It was disheartening but,
this time, the paternal feeling didn’t fade at all. It was like someone had
jammed a switch on: I now wanted to have kids as much as David. But it
wasn’t a straight-forward process. Adoption was still incredibly tricky for a
gay couple, and the other option, surrogacy, was pretty fraught too.
Transactional surrogacy is technically against the law in the UK, although
you can have a child in a country where it’s legal, then bring them back to
live in Britain. We spoke to our doctor in California and were introduced to a
company called California Fertility Partners. The process is incredibly
convoluted: there are egg donor agencies and surrogacy agencies, and there

are tricky legal processes involved, especially if you live abroad. The more
we looked into it, the more complicated it seemed to become. After a while,
my head was swimming with hormone therapies and blastocysts, embryo
transfers and parenting orders and egg donors.

We were advised to find a surrogate who was unmarried — there were
cases in the past of married surrogates’ husbands making a legal claim to the
child even though they had no biological connection. We decided to both
contribute to the sperm sample, so we wouldn’t know which one of us was
the biological parent. We were advised that everything had to take place
under a veil of strict secrecy. We were to remain anonymous to the surrogate,
adopting the guise of Edward and James, an English gay couple who were
vaguely described as ‘working in the entertainment business’, while everyone
else involved had to be bound by strict legal non-disclosure agreements.
Having recently received a powerful lesson in the benefits of keeping my
mouth shut, I thought that made perfect sense. When the media had found out
the identity of Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker’s surrogate, the
poor woman had been forced into hiding: the last thing anyone wanted was
an expectant mother being harassed by the press.

Surrogacy involves a real leap of faith. Once you’ve selected your egg
donor and left your sperm sample at the fertility clinic, your fate is entirely in
the hands of others. We were incredibly lucky. We found an amazing doctor
called Guy Ringler, a gay man who specializes in fertility for LGBT parents.
And we found the most remarkable surrogate. She lived north of San
Francisco and had been a surrogate before. She was completely uninterested
in celebrity or money: all she cared about was helping loving couples to have
children. She worked out who Edward and James really were about three
months into her pregnancy and she didn’t bat an eyelid. David drove up to
meet her, outside of her hometown in case he was recognized. It was when he
came back, gushing about how incredible she was, that everything suddenly
became very real. I didn’t feel any trepidation or doubt about our decision; no
panic, no ‘what have we done?’ — just excitement and anticipation.

The rest of the pregnancy passed in a blur. The baby was due on 21
December 2010. We became very close to the surrogate, her boyfriend and
her family. The more I got to know them, the more I started to hate the phrase

‘transactional surrogacy’. It sounded so clinical and mercenary, and there was
nothing clinical or mercenary about these people at all: they were kind and
loving and genuinely delighted to be helping us achieve a dream. We
arranged to hire a nanny, the same one who had looked after our friend
Elizabeth Hurley’s son. We knew her because Liz had stayed at Woodside
after she had given birth to keep out of the media’s glare. We began creating
a nursery at our apartment in LA, but it all had to be done under the veil of
secrecy: everything we bought was sent to our office in LA, taken out of its
packaging and wrapped so it looked like a Christmas present for David or me
when it arrived at our home.

When the due date drew close, the surrogate and her family moved to a
hotel in LA. Ingrid and Sandy, who we had asked to be godparents, flew in
for the birth. We had planned to make a surprise announcement that we had
become a family at a Christmas lunch for our friends in LA, but we had to
keep putting the lunch off because the baby was late. Eventually, the
surrogate got sick of sleepless nights, back pain and swollen ankles and took
decisive action. There was a restaurant in LA, on Coldwater Canyon, that
served a watercress soup reputed to induce labour. The reputation was
obviously fully deserved: we got a phone call on the afternoon of Christmas
Eve, telling us to rush to the Cedars-Sinai hospital.

Still concerned about the veil of secrecy, I arrived in disguise, dressed
down and wearing a cap. As it turned out, I could have arrived at the hospital
in the four-foot-high Doc Martens I wore in Tommy and my old glasses that
lit up in the shape of the word ELTON and no one would have noticed,
because no one was there. The place was absolutely deserted. The maternity
ward looked like the hotel in The Shining. We learned that no one wants to
have a baby at Christmas: they either induce or have caesareans to avoid
being in hospital over the holidays. No one, that is, except us. We had
deliberately tried to time the birth so that it would happen when I wasn’t
working or away on tour. So there wasn’t a soul around, except for us and
one other woman in the room next door, an Australian who had twins. And
our son, who arrived at two thirty in the morning on Christmas Day.

I cut the umbilical cord — I’m normally incredibly squeamish, but the
emotion of what had happened completely took over. We took our shirts off

so the baby would have skin-to-skin contact. We called him Zachary Jackson
Levon. Everybody always assumes the last name came from the song Bernie
and I wrote on Madman Across the Water, but they’re wrong: he’s named
after Lev. He had to be. Lev was like an angel, a messenger, who taught me
something about myself that I didn’t really understand. Lev was the reason
we were there, on a maternity ward, holding our son, knowing that our lives
had just completely changed forever.

"eS

As well as Ingrid and Sandy, we asked Lady Gaga to be Zachary’s
godmother. I had started collaborating with a lot of younger artists, everyone
from the Scissor Sisters to Kanye West. It was always incredibly flattering to
be asked to work with people who weren’t even born when my career took
off, but of all the young artists I collaborated with, I had a special bond with
Gaga. I loved her from the moment I clapped eyes on her: the music she
made, the outrageous clothes, the sense of theatre and spectacle. We were
very different people — she was a young woman from New York, barely into
her twenties — but as soon as we met, it was obvious we were cut from
exactly the same cloth: I called her the Bastard Daughter of Elton John. I
loved her so much, I got myself into yet more trouble with the press. I’d
always got on fine with Madonna. I used to make fun of her for lip-synching
onstage, but the problem really started when she ran Gaga down on an
American chat show. I got that Gaga’s single ‘Born This Way’ definitely
sounded similar to ‘Express Yourself’, but I couldn’t see why she was so
ungracious and nasty about it, rather than taking it as a compliment when a
new generation of artists was influenced by her, particularly when she claims
to be a champion for women. I think it’s just wrong — an established artist
shouldn’t kick down a younger artist right at the start of their career. I was
furious and I said some pretty horrible things about her to a TV interviewer in
Australia, a guy I’d known since the seventies called Molly Meldrum. You
can tell from the footage that it wasn’t part of the interview, that I was just
sounding off to an old friend between takes — you can hear people moving
cameras around to set up the next shot while we’re talking — but they
broadcast it anyway, which brought that particular old friendship to a very

swift conclusion. Still, I shouldn’t have said it. I apologized afterwards when
I bumped into her in a restaurant in France and she was very gracious about
it. Gaga turned out to be a great godmother: she would turn up backstage and
insist on giving Zachary his bath while dressed in full Gaga regalia, which
was quite an incredible sight.

In fact, everything about fatherhood is incredible. I haven’t got any great
insights into being a father that you haven’t already heard a hundred times
before. All those clichés about it grounding you, changing the way you look
at the world, experiencing a love unlike any other love you’ve felt in your
life, how awe-inspiring it is to see a person forming in front of your eyes — all
are true. But perhaps I felt all those things more keenly because I never
thought I would be a father until quite late on in my life. If you had tried to
tell the Elton John of the seventies or eighties that he could find more
fulfilment on a deep and profound level in changing a nappy than in writing a
song or playing a gig, you would probably have had to exit the room at high
speed immediately afterwards, with hurled crockery flying past your ears.
And yet it was true: the responsibility was huge, but there is nothing about
being a father that I don’t love. I even found the toddler tantrums weirdly
charming. You think you’re being difficult, my little sausage? Have I ever
told you about the time I drank eight vodka martinis, took all my clothes off
in front of a film crew and then broke my manager’s nose?

We knew we wanted another child almost straight away. It was largely
because we loved being parents so much, but there was more to it than that.
However normal we tried to make our child’s life, the fact is that it was never
going to be entirely normal, because of what one of his parents did for a
living and everything that comes attached. Because, before he started school,
Zachary always came with me on tour; he had been around the world twice
by the time he was four years old. He’d been bathed by Lady Gaga and
jigged up and down on Eminem’s knee. He’d stood in the wings of shows at
Las Vegas and had his photograph taken by paparazzi, which, to my delight,
he endured rather than enjoyed: a chip off the old block, there. These are not
the normal experiences of a toddler. There’s obviously a degree of privilege
that goes with being Elton John’s son, but you would be fooling yourself if
you didn’t think there was also a degree of burden. I had hated being an only

child, and it seemed right that he should have a sibling who he could share
with, who would understand his experience of life. We used the same
surrogate, same agencies, same egg donor and everything fell perfectly into
place again: Elijah was born on 11 January 2013.

The only person who didn’t seem delighted for us was my mother. My
relationship with her had always been tough going, but it never really
recovered after our civil partnership ceremony in 2005. As usual, things got
smoothed over as best I could, but something about her had definitely
changed, or at least been amplified. The drizzle of criticism tumed into a
constant downpour. She seemed to go out of her way to tell me how much
she hated what I was doing. If I made a new album, it was a load of rubbish:
why didn’t I try to be more like Robbie Williams? Couldn’t I write songs like
that anymore? If I bought a new painting, it was bleedin’ ugly and she could
have painted something better herself. If I played a charity gig, it was the
most boring thing she’d ever sat through in her life, the evening only saved
from complete disaster by someone else’s performance, which had stolen the
show. If the AIDS Foundation held a glittering fundraising dinner packed
with stars, it was evidence that I was only interested in fame and kissing
celebrities’ arses.

For variety, she threw in the occasional thunderclap of real anger. I never
knew when they were coming or what was going to provoke them. Spending
time with her was like inviting an unexploded bomb to lunch or on holiday
with you: I was always on edge, wondering what was going to set her off.
Once it was the fact that I’d bought a kennel for the dogs we kept at the house
in Nice. Once it was Billy Elliot, apparently the only thing I’d done in about
ten years that she thought was any good. The musical had really taken off in a
way that no one involved in it had predicted, not just in the UK but in
countries where people had barely heard of the Miners’ Strike or the impact
of Thatcherism on the British manufacturing industry: the story at its heart
turned out to be universal. Mum went to see it in London dozens of times,
until one afternoon, when the box office misplaced her tickets for the matinee
and took five minutes to find them, something she decided I had deliberately,
meticulously planned in an attempt to humiliate her. Luckily, I followed Billy
Elliot up with The Vampire Lestat, a musical Bernie and I wrote together,

which bombed — everything went wrong, from the timing, to the staging, to
the dialogue — and normal service was resumed: it provided my mother with
the unmissable opportunity to inform me that she had known from the start it
would be a terrible flop.

I still tried to laugh it all off, or ignore it, but it wasn’t that easy. If she
wanted a row, Mum always knew which buttons to press, because she had
installed the buttons in the first place. She still had the ability to make me feel
as if I were a terrified ten-year-old back in Pinner, like everything was my
fault: I was constantly in fear, metaphorically speaking, of getting a smack.
The result was exactly what you would expect: I started to actively avoid her.
On my sixtieth birthday, I had a huge party in New York at St John the
Divine, the same cathedral where I later saw Aretha Franklin sing for the last
time. Mum had been one of the guests of honour at my fiftieth, the famous
fancy dress party where she and Derf came as the Queen and the Duke of
Edinburgh, and I wore a Louis XVI costume with a train held by two men
dressed as Cupid and a wig so huge I had to travel there in the back of a
furniture van. I had ample time to reconsider the wisdom of this idea when
the furniture van got stuck in a traffic jam for an hour and a half. This time, I
decided not to invite her. I knew she would come and pour cold water on the
whole event; she wouldn’t enjoy herself and nor would I. I made an excuse
about it being too far for her to travel — she hadn’t been well — but the truth
was, I just didn’t want her there.

By the time Zachary was bom, we weren’t speaking at all. Mum had
moved beyond just constantly criticizing, into going out of her way to try and
be hurtful. She had delighted in telling me she was still friends with John
Reid after our business relationship collapsed: ‘I don’t know what you’re
upset about,’ she snapped, when I pointed out that this seemed a bit disloyal.
‘It’s only money.’ That was certainly one way of describing what had
happened. But the final row came when my PA, Bob Halley, left. We’d been
together since the seventies but the relationship had become strained. Bob
enjoyed a very lavish lifestyle by proxy, and he didn’t like it at all when the
management tried to rein in spending, to make my tours more cost-efficient:
it’s strange sometimes how fame affects the people around you more than it
affects you. The flashpoint was an argument over which car service we

should use. The management had brought in a more competitive company.
Bob had got rid of them and employed a more expensive one. The
management office overruled him and reinstated their choice of car service.
Bob was furious. We had a big argument about it in the St. Regis hotel in
New York. He said he’d been undermined, his authority had been challenged.
I said we were just trying to save money. He told me he was going to leave
and I lost my temper and told him that was fine with me. Later, after I had
calmed down, I went back to speak to him again. This time he told me that he
hated everyone at the Rocket office: apparently my entire management team
were in his bad books. I didn’t really know what to say to that: your entire
team or your PA? It’s not exactly the toughest choice in the world. Bob
announced that he was quitting his job and stormed out, adding, as he left,
that my career would be over in six months without him. Whatever Bob’s
talents were, clairvoyance was clearly not among them. The only change in
my career after he quit was that the bills for touring expenses got noticeably
smaller.

My mum was absolutely livid when she heard Bob had left — they had
always got on well. She didn’t want to hear my version of events, and told me
that Bob had been more of a son to her than I had ever been.

“You care more about that fucking thing you married than your own
mother,’ she spat.

ey ae

We didn’t speak again for seven years after that phone call. There comes a
point where you realize you’re just banging your head against a brick wall:
no matter how many times you do it, you’re never going to break through,
you’re just going to end up with a constant headache. I still made sure she
was looked after financially. When she said she wanted to move to Worthing,
I bought her a new house. I paid for everything; made sure she had the best
care when she needed a hip operation. She auctioned every gift I’d ever given
her — everything from jewellery to platinum discs I’d had specially inscribed
with her name — but she didn’t need money. She told the papers she was
downsizing, but it was just another way of telling me to fuck off — like hiring
an Elton John tribute act for her ninetieth birthday party. I ended up buying

back some of the jewellery myself, stuff that had sentimental value to me,
even if it no longer had for Mum.

It was sad, but I didn’t want her in my life anymore. I didn’t invite her to
the ceremony when the law around gay partnerships changed again and
David and I got married in December 2014. It was a much smaller, more
private event than the civil partnership. We went to the registry office in
Maidenhead alone, then the registrar came back to Woodside and performed
the ceremony there. The boys were ring-bearers: we tied the same gold bands
we had used in the civil partnership — the ones we had bought in Paris years
before — to a couple of toy rabbits with ribbon, and Zachary and Elijah
carried them in.

I would say Mum missed out on her grandsons growing up — my auntie
Win and my cousins flocked around, the way normal families do when there
are babies and toddlers to be fussed over and played with and treated — but
honestly, she didn’t care. When Zachary was born, a tabloid journalist
doorstepped her and asked her how she felt about not seeing her first
grandchild, looking for a scoop about the callously abandoned grandmother.
He didn’t get it. She told him she wasn’t bothered, and that she didn’t like,
and had never liked, children. I laughed when I read it: no points for winning
yourself sympathy, Mum, but ten out of ten for honesty.

I got back into contact with her when I found out she was seriously ill. I
sent her an email with some photos of the kids attached. She barely
acknowledged them: ‘You’ve got your hands full’ was the only mention of
them in her reply. I invited her to lunch. Nothing much had changed. She
walked into Woodside and the first thing she said was, ‘I’d forgotten how
small this place is.’ But I was determined not to answer back, not to rise to
the bait. The kids were home, playing together upstairs, and I asked if she
wanted to see them; my mum said no. I told her that I didn’t want to talk
about John Reid, or Bob Halley, that I just wanted to tell her after all we’d
been through that I loved her.

‘I love you too,’ she said. ‘But I don’t like you at all.’

Oh well — at least things stayed cordial otherwise. We would talk on the
phone occasionally. I never asked her what she thought of anything I had
done, and if I mentioned the kids she always changed the subject. I managed

to get her and Auntie Win talking again — they had fallen out when Derf died
in 2010 and Mum had refused to let Win’s son Paul come to the funeral,
telling her that ‘Fred never liked him’ — so that was something. No luck
building bridges between her and Uncle Reg, though. I can’t even remember
what that argument had been about, but they still weren’t talking when she
died in December 2017.

I was incredibly upset when Mum died. I had gone down to Worthing to
see her the week before — I knew she was terminally ill, but she hadn’t
seemed like someone who was at death’s door that afternoon. It was an odd
meeting: when I knocked on the door of her house, Bob Halley answered. We
said hello and shook hands, which seemed to be the highlight of the afternoon
as far as Mum was concerned.

Mum was never one of life’s tactile, nurturing, come-here-and-give-me-a-
hug mothers, and there was a mean streak to her that went beyond just being
prone to bad moods, or a victim of the Dwight Family Temper, into
something else entirely, something I didn’t like to think about too deeply,
because it frightened me. She seemed to actively enjoy picking fights, and
not just with me: there wasn’t a member of the family she didn’t fall out
badly with over the years. And yet there had been times when she was
supportive, and there were times, at the start of my career, when she was
really good fun. That’s how people who knew her in the early seventies
remembered her to me after she died: oh, your mum was such a laugh.

We held a private family funeral for her in the chapel at Woodside: I
wanted to remember the good things, with just relations around me. I talked
about her at the service and I cried. I missed the person I was describing
terribly, but I’d started missing her decades before Mum died; she just
seemed to vanish as quickly and unexpectedly as she turned up. At the end,
her coffin was taken away in a hearse. We all stood there, what was left of the
Dwights and the Harrises, watching it go down the long drive at Woodside in
silence. It was broken by my uncle Reg, addressing his sister for the last time.

“You can’t answer anyone back now, can you, Sheila?’ he muttered.

seventeen

I’ve been a professional musician for my entire adult life, but I’ve never got
bored with playing live. Even when I thought I had — when I was playing the
cabaret circuit with Long John Baldry, or in the mid-seventies, when I was
just exhausted — I obviously hadn’t. You could tell by the way I would
grandly announce my retirement, then end up back onstage weeks later.
Throughout my life that feeling I get before I go on each night, the mix of
adrenalin and anxiety, has never changed, and thank God it hasn’t, because
that feeling is fucking great. It’s addictive. You might get sick of the
travelling, the promotion, all the stuff that surrounds playing live, but that
feeling will always keep you coming back for more. That, and the knowledge
that even at the worst show — bad sound, dull audience, lousy venue —
something amazing will always happen onstage: a spark, a flash of
inspiration, a song you’ve played a thousand times that unexpectedly causes a
long-forgotten memory to reappear in your mind.

So the music will always surprise you, but after fifty years you do start to
feel as if nothing else that happens at a gig can. It’s easy to think that you’ve
done pretty much everything it’s possible to do onstage except keel over and
die. I’ve performed sober, I’ve performed drunk and I have — to my shame —
performed high as a kite. I’ve done gigs that made me feel as elated as it’s
possible for a human being to feel, and struggled through shows in the pits of
despair. I’ve played pianos, I’ve jumped on pianos, I’ve fallen off pianos and
I’ve pushed a piano into the crowd, hit a member of the audience with it and
spent the rest of the night frantically apologizing to them. I’ve played with
my childhood heroes and some of the greatest artists in the history of music;

I’ve played with people who were so hopeless they had no business being
onstage and I’ve played with a group of male strippers dressed as Cub
Scouts. I’ve done gigs dressed as a woman, a cat, Minnie Mouse, Donald
Duck, a Ruritanian general, a musketeer, a pantomime dame and, very
occasionally, I’ve played gigs dressed like a normal human being. I’ve had
gigs that were disrupted by bomb scares, gigs disrupted by student protests
against the war in Vietnam and gigs that were disrupted because I flounced
offstage in a huff and then came scuttling back shortly afterwards, contrite
about losing my temper. I’ve had hot dogs thrown at me in Paris; I’ve been
knocked unconscious by a hash pipe while wearing a giant chicken outfit in
North Carolina — my band thought I’d been shot — and I’ve run onstage in a
gorilla costume in an attempt to surprise Iggy Pop. That wasn’t one of my
better ideas. It was 1973 and I had been to see The Stooges the night before.
It was just the greatest thing I’d ever seen — 180 degrees away from my
music, but incredible, the energy of it, the sheer noise they made, Iggy
climbing all over the place like Spider-Man. So the next night I went to see
them again — they were playing a week of shows at a club called Richards in
Atlanta. I thought it would be funny if I hired a gorilla costume and ran
onstage during their set — you know, just adding to the general mayhem and
anarchy. Instead, I was taught an important life lesson, which is this: if you’re
planning to run onstage in a gorilla suit and surprise someone, always check
first to see whether or not the person you’re surprising has taken so much
acid before the show that they’re unable to differentiate between a man in a
gorilla costume and an actual gorilla. I discovered this when my appearance
was greeted not with gales of laughter but the sight of Iggy Pop screaming
and shrinking away from me in terror. This was quickly followed by the
realization that I was no longer on the stage but flying through the air at high
speed. Sensing the need for decisive action, another member of The Stooges
had stopped playing, picked me up and thrown me into the crowd.

You can see why I might occasionally think that I’ve covered the full
panoply of live incidents, that there isn’t really anything left to do during a
gig that I haven’t already done. But of course, when you do start thinking
that, life has a habit of letting you know you’re wrong. Which brings us to the
night in Las Vegas in 2017 when I found myself leaping up from the piano as

the last chord of ‘Rocket Man’ died away and walking across the stage of the
Colosseum, basking in the crowd’s applause, punching the air and pointing at
fans who were going particularly wild. Nothing unusual in itself, save for the
fact that, as I was walking across the stage, basking in the crowd’s applause
and punching the air, I was also, unbeknown to the audience, copiously
urinating into an adult nappy concealed beneath my suit. Pissing myself in
front of an audience while wearing a giant nappy: this was definitely hitherto
uncharted territory. There aren’t a huge number of positives about contracting
prostate cancer, but at least it had enabled me to have an entirely new and
unprecedented experience onstage.

ee S

My life is never quiet, but the preceding few years had been even more
tumultuous than usual. Some aspects of them had been really positive. I
settled into fatherhood far more easily than I would ever have expected. I
loved doing everyday stuff with the boys — taking them to the cinema on a
Saturday; going to Legoland and to meet Father Christmas at Windsor Great
Park. I loved taking them to see Watford. They’re football-mad. I can spend
hours talking about it with them, answering their questions about its history:
‘Who was George Best, Dad?’ ‘Why was Pelé such a great player?’ They
came to Vicarage Road for the opening of a stand named after me, something
I’m incredibly proud about; there’s a stand there named after Graham Taylor,
too. Since then, they’ve been mascots at matches and they go to games all the
time.

And I loved how having kids rooted me in the village nearest to
Woodside. I’d lived there since the mid-seventies, without ever really getting
to know anyone locally. But when the boys started nursery and school, they
made friends, and their friends’ parents became our friends. They didn’t care
about who I was. A harassed mum at the school gates is less interested in
asking you how you wrote ‘Bennie And The Jets’, or what Princess Diana
was really like than in talking about uniforms and packed lunches and the
difficulty of assembling a costume for the nativity play at forty-eight hours’
notice — which was fine by me. We ended up with a whole new social circle
we never would have had when David and I were just a famous, jet-setting

gay couple.

I had opened a new Vegas show, The Million Dollar Piano, in 2011. It
was less controversial than its predecessor, but just as spectacular and
successful. I brought Tony King in to act as creative director — he’d been
working for The Rolling Stones for years, travelling around the world with
them on their tours — and he did an incredible job. He’s been part of my
organization ever since: his official job title is Eminence Grise, which just fits
Tony perfectly. The following year, I made Good Morning to the Night, an
album unlike anything I had done before, that went to Number One. Or
rather, I didn’t make Good Morning to the Night: I handed over the master
tapes of my seventies albums to Pnau, an Australian electronic duo that I
loved, and told them to do whatever they wanted with them. They remixed
different elements from old songs into entirely new tracks, making me sound
like Pink Floyd or Daft Punk in the process. I thought the results were
fantastic, but I didn’t understand the process they used; there was an album
with my name on it at Number One and I had no idea whatsoever how it had
been made. We played together at a festival in Ibiza, which was fantastic. I
always feel nervous before a gig — I think the day you stop feeling nervous is
the day you start phoning it in — but this time, I was genuinely terrified. The
crowd were so young; they could theoretically have been my grandkids, and
the first part of the show was just me and a piano. And they loved it. There’s
something incredibly gratifying about seeing an audience that’s completely
different from the people who normally come to see you enjoying what you
do.

Pnau weren’t the only people I collaborated with. I worked with all sorts
of different people: Queens of the Stone Age, A Tribe Called Quest, Jack
White, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I love going into the studio with artists
people wouldn’t ordinarily expect me to play with. It reminds me of being a
session musician in the late sixties: that challenge of having to adapt your
style and think on your feet musically is still really exciting to me.

I was in the studio with Clean Bandit when I was called to the phone:
apparently Vladimir Putin wanted to speak to me. There had been a lot of
publicity about a couple of gigs I’d done in Russia, where I spoke out about
LGBTQ rights onstage. I’d dedicated a show in Moscow to the memory of

Vladislav Tomovoi, a young man who had been tortured and murdered in
Volgograd for being gay, and in St Petersburg I’d talked about how
ridiculous it was that a monument to Steve Jobs in the city had been taken
down when his successor as Apple CEO, Tim Cook, came out. It turned out
to be a prank call, by two guys who’d done the same thing to all sorts of
public figures, including Mikhail Gorbachev. They recorded the whole thing
and broadcast it on Russian TV, but, fuck it, I wasn’t embarrassed at all,
because I hadn’t said anything stupid to them; I’d just said how grateful I was
and how I’d love to meet face to face to discuss civil rights and provision for
AIDS treatment. Besides, the real Vladimir Putin rang me at home a few
weeks later to apologize and said he wanted to set up a meeting. The meeting
hasn’t happened — I’ve been back to Russia since, but my invite to the
Kremlin seems to have got lost in the post. But I live in hope.

You don’t achieve anything by cutting people off. It’s like when I played
at the wedding of the right-wing talk show DJ Rush Limbaugh in 2010. I was
surprised to be asked — the first thing I said onstage was ‘I expect you’re
wondering what the fuck I’m doing here’ — and I got really hauled over the
coals in the media: he said some incredibly stupid things about AIDS, how
can you possibly perform for him? But I’d rather try and build a bridge to
someone on the opposite side to me than put up a wall. And in any case, I
donated my fee for the performance — and I assure you that, as a wedding
singer, I don’t come cheap — to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. So I
managed to turn a right-wing talk show DJ’s wedding into a fundraising
benefit for AIDS.

But a lot of awful things happened in those years, too. Bob Birch, who
had played bass in my band for over twenty years, committed suicide. He had
been unwell since a car accident in the mid-nineties — a truck had hit him in
the street before a gig in Montreal, and he never really recovered from his
injuries — but I don’t think I fully grasped how much pain he was in or the
psychological toll it was taking on him. He seemed incredibly resilient — at
first they told him he would never walk again, but he was back on tour within
six months. His playing never faltered and he never complained, even when
he had to perform sitting down. But then, during the summer break in our
2012 touring schedule, his injuries got worse until it must have become

unbearable. I got the phone call from Davey at six o’clock in the morning in
Nice, telling me Bob had shot himself outside his home in Los Angeles. I
wished he’d reached out; I wished he’d said something. I don’t know what I
could have done, but I couldn’t stop the thought haunting me after his death
that he had suffered in silence.

Then Ingrid Sischy died. She’d had breast cancer before, in the late
nineties: she’d called me up in tears in Nice, asking if I could help her get an
appointment with a top oncologist called Larry Norton, the same doctor that
had treated Linda McCartney. The cancer went into remission but, from that
point, Ingrid was terrified of it returning. She was so paranoid about it,
looking for signs that it had returned in the most bizarre places, that it became
a running joke between us.

‘Elton, look, my hands are shaking, do you think I have cancer of the
hand?’

‘Oh, yeah, Ingrid, you’ve got cancer of the hand now. You’ve probably
got cancer of the teeth and the hair as well.’

It seemed funny at the time, because I couldn’t imagine her actually
dying. I’d never met anyone with that much vitality; she was always doing
something, a million projects on the go at once. And she was so present in my
life: I would literally ring her every weekday, Monday to Friday, for a chat
and gossip and to ask for her opinions, of which she had an apparently
fathomless supply. When someone has that much life force inside them, when
someone takes up so much space, it just seems impossible that life could be
snuffed out.

Until it was. The cancer returned in 2015 and she died very suddenly — so
suddenly that I had to race from Britain to America to see her before she
passed away. I just made it. I got to say goodbye, which hadn’t happened
with a lot of my friends who had died. In a way, I was pleased it was so
sudden: Ingrid was so scared of cancer, so scared of dying, and at least she
didn’t have to spend weeks or months facing death. But it wasn’t really any
consolation. I’d lost Gianni; now I’d lost another best friend, another almost-
sibling. I never stop thinking about her: there are photos of her all over my
houses, so she’s always there. I miss her advice, I miss that intelligence, I
miss her passion, I miss the laughs. I miss her.

And then there was David. I can’t say I hadn’t noticed he was drinking a
lot more, maybe too much. He started coming to bed most nights with a glass
of wine and would sip it while he was reading and chatting. Or he’d stay up
much later than me, and the next morning, I’d see the empty bottle by the
kitchen sink. Sometimes two. A couple of times when we were on holiday at
the house in Nice, he didn’t come to bed at all. I’d find him in the morning,
spark out in front of his computer, or on the sofa in the living room. But I
honestly didn’t think he had any issues. Regardless of what had happened the
previous evening, he would be up at seven and off to work. There were times
when we were out, and he’d get drunk — after a joint birthday party I had with
Sam Taylor-Wood, I remember having to grab his arm and guide him very
firmly to the car, so he didn’t weave about in front of the paparazzi — but he
never made a fool of himself. Given that, after a few vodka martinis, I had
been capable of anything from verbal abuse to violence to displays of public
nudity, you can understand how I failed to notice David had a serious
problem.

I didn’t realize he was propping himself up with booze. I always thought
David had slipped into Elton John World with remarkable ease and
confidence, but it turned out that a lot of things I was completely used to
living with, that I just saw as a fact of life, made him anxious. He didn’t like
being photographed all the time, or being under press scrutiny, or public
speaking at AIDS Foundation events. He was always a nervous flyer, but, in
my life, hardly a week goes by when you don’t set foot on a plane. He found
it all easier to deal with after a few drinks. Plus, there was the fact that we
were often apart — I was away all the time doing gigs, and he was back at
home. I don’t want to make him sound like a kind of rock and roll touring
widow -— he had plenty going on in his life — but after a while, he got lonely
and bored, and one way of feeling less lonely and bored is cracking open a
bottle of nice wine or knocking back a few vodkas. And on top of everything
else, there were the kids. As any new parent will tell you, however much you
love it, there are moments when you feel shaken by the responsibility of it all.
David wouldn’t have been the first parent in history to race to the fridge after
bedtime, in urgent need of a glass of something cold, alcoholic and relaxing.
Obviously, we had help, but it doesn’t really matter if you’ve got the best

nannies in the universe: every new parent who cares about their children has
points where they feel overwhelmed by the idea of bringing new humans into
the world and ensuring their lives are as good as they can be.

If you treat your anxieties with booze, it usually works, at least while
you’re drinking: it’s the next morning that you find yourself feeling more
anxious than ever. And that’s what happened to David. It all came to a head
in Los Angeles in 2014, two days before I was due to start a US tour. I was
leaving that night for Atlanta: Tony King was flying in, and I was looking
forward to catching up before the tour began. David was feeling low and
wanted me to stay the extra night with him. I said no. We had a huge row. I
went anyway. The next morning, David called and we had a row that made
the previous day’s row look like a light-hearted disagreement over what to
have for lunch: the kind of argument where you come off the phone teary and
reeling, where things are said that make you wonder whether the next time
you communicate, it’ll be through lawyers. In fact, the next time I heard from
David, he had checked himself into a rehab clinic in Malibu. He told me that
after he had come off the phone, he had lain in bed. He could hear Elijah and
Zachary playing just down the hall, but he was too depressed and anxious to
get up and see them. That was it: he contacted the doctor, told her he had had
enough, that he needed help.

I was pleased he was getting treatment. I felt bad that I hadn’t noticed
things had got as out of hand as they had: once I did, I just wanted David to
get better. But I was also weirdly nervous. The world doesn’t have a bigger
advocate for getting sober than me, but I also know that it’s a huge
undertaking: it can change people completely. What if the man I loved came
home a different person? What if our relationship changed — the way my
relationship with Hugh had changed when we got sober — and became
unworkable? It was enough to keep me up at night, but when David came
back, he didn’t seem that different, although he had more energy and more
focus, and he was dedicated to working on his recovery in a way that affected
me. I started going to AA meetings again. I hadn’t been since the early
nineties and I only went to keep David company and show support, but when
I got in there, I found I really enjoyed it. You always hear something
inspiring; you always come out with your spirits lifted. We started hosting a

meeting at home, every Sunday, inviting friends who are also in recovery,
like Tony King. I suppose it’s a little like going to church — just being
thankful for your sobriety. I always come out bouncing.

David seemed to be bouncing, too. Not long after he got sober, I parted
company with Frank Presland, who’d gone from being my lawyer to my
manager. I’d had a succession of different managers since John Reid, but
none of them had really worked out. I thought about different options, then
found myself wondering if David couldn’t do it. Before we had met, he was a
hot-shot advertising executive. He oversaw huge campaigns, worked with
budgets — the skills you needed to do that didn’t seem so different to the skills
you needed in rock management. There were obviously reservations about
having a business relationship with your partner, but I liked the idea of us
working together: we had kids, it would be like a family business. David was
nervous about taking the role on, but eventually he agreed.

He really ran at the task: never underestimate the zeal of the newly sober.
He streamlined the company and made financial savings. He started changing
things to suit the way the music business was changing: taking streaming into
account, and social media. I didn’t know anything about that stuff. I’ve never
owned a mobile phone. As you might expect, given my collector’s mentality,
I’m not really interested in streaming music: I like to own albums, lots of
them, preferably on vinyl. And, having taken into account both my temper
and my impressive track record of expressing what you might call robust and
forthright opinions, I realized that my going anywhere near something like
Twitter was likely to end in complete bedlam, at best.

But David worked it all out. He built up a great team. He seemed
genuinely interested in areas of the music industry that I couldn’t have been
more bored by. He started really pushing to get a biopic made of my life. The
idea had started years before, with the films David LaChapelle made for The
Red Piano shows in Vegas: if a film was going to be made about me, I
wanted it to look like them. They were gritty, but they were fantastical and
surreal and over-the-top, and my career’s been fantastical and surreal and
over-the-top, so they fitted perfectly. We got Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot,
to write the screenplay, which I loved, but it took years and years to get it off
the ground. Directors and lead actors came and went. David LaChapelle was

supposed to direct it initially, but he wanted to concentrate on his fine art
career. Tom Hardy was going to play me, but he couldn’t sing, and I really
wanted whoever was going to be me to perform the songs, rather than lip-
synch them. There was a lot of wrangling with studios over budgets and over
the content of the film. People kept asking us to tone the gay sex and drugs
down so it would get a PG-13 rating, but, you know, I’m a gay man and a
recovering addict: there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point in making a
sanitized film about me that leaves out the sex and the coke. There was a time
when I didn’t think it was going to happen, but David kept plugging away,
and eventually it did.

And he had some radical new ideas. I discovered just how radical one
morning in LA, when he presented me with a sheet of paper. He had written
down a load of dates relating to Zachary and Elijah’s school life — when each
term would start, how long the holidays were, the years they would be
moving up from infants to juniors and then secondary school, when they
would be sitting exams.

‘How much of this do you want to be around for?’ he asked. ‘You can
work your tour schedules around it.’

I looked at the sheet of paper. It effectively mapped out their lives. By the
time they reached the final dates on it, they wouldn’t be children anymore,
they would be teenagers, young men. And I would be in my eighties.

‘All of it,’ I said finally. ‘I want to be there for all of it.’

David raised his eyebrows. ‘In which case,’ he said, ‘you need to think
about changing your life. You need to think about retiring from touring.’

It was a huge decision. I’ve always thought of myself as a working
musician, just as I was when Bluesology were going up and down the
motorway in the van that Amold Tendler had forked out for on our behalf.
That’s not false modesty. Fairly obviously, I’m not exactly the same as I was
in the sixties — I can assure you it’s a very long time indeed since I arrived at
a gig in the back of a transit van — but the underlying philosophy, if you like,
has never changed. Back then, if you got a gig, you went and played it: that’s
ultimately how you earned your living; that’s how you defined yourself as a
musician. I prided myself on the fact that my schedule now wasn’t that
different from my schedule in the early seventies. Bigger venues, obviously,

more luxurious accommodation and travel arrangements, and less time spent
locking myself in the lavatory backstage to avoid the attentions of female
groupies. Even the most ardent among them had long ago got the memo
regarding the improbability of Elton John being swayed by their charms. But
I played roughly the same number of gigs: 120 or 130 a year. However many
shows I did, I wanted to do more the following year. I kept a list of countries
I still wanted to play — places I hadn’t visited yet; countries like Egypt, where
I’d thus far been banned from performing because I was gay. I was fond of
saying I would be happy to die onstage.

But David’s list of school dates had thrown me. My kids were only going
to grow up once. I didn’t want to be in Madison Square Garden, or the Los
Angeles Staples Center, or the Taco Bell Arena, Boise, while it happened,
much as I loved the fans who came to see me there. I didn’t want to be
anywhere other than with Zachary and Elijah. I’d finally found something
that matched the lure of the stage. We started making plans for a farewell
tour. It had to be bigger and more spectacular than anything I had done
before, a big celebration, a thank-you to the people who’d bought albums and
tickets over the years.

The plans for the farewell tour were already underway when I found out I
had cancer. They discovered it during a routine check-up. My doctor noticed
that the level of prostate-specific antigens in my blood had gone up slightly,
and sent me to an oncologist for a biopsy. It came back positive. It was
Strange: I wasn’t as shocked at hearing the word ‘cancer’ as I had been back
in the eighties, when they thought I had it in my throat. I think it was because
it was prostate cancer. It’s no joke, but it’s incredibly common, they had
caught it very early, and besides, I’m blessed with the kind of constitution
that just makes me bounce back from illnesses. I’d had a couple of serious
health scares before, and they didn’t really slow me down. In the nineties, I
was taken ill en route to David and Victoria Beckham’s wedding. I felt faint
that morning when I was playing tennis, and passed out in the car on the way
to the airport. I missed the wedding, went to the hospital, they monitored my
heart and told me that I had an inner-ear infection. The next day, I was
playing tennis again, when David came thundering down from the house
yelling that I had to stop immediately. My feelings about being interrupted

while I’m playing tennis are a matter of public record — you may recall the
incident in Tantrums and Tiaras where I announced I was leaving France
immediately and never coming back, because a fan had waved at me and
shouted ‘yoo-hoo!’ while I was trying to serve. I had just begun telling David
to fuck off in no uncertain terms, when he shouted that the hospital had
called; they had made a mistake — I had a heart irregularity and I had to fly to
London immediately to get a pacemaker fitted. I was only in the hospital for
one night and, rather than feeling debilitated, I thought the pacemaker was
fantastic. It seemed to give me more energy than before.

More recently, I’d managed to play nine gigs, take twenty-four flights and
perform with Coldplay at a fundraising ball for the AIDS Foundation with a
burst appendix: the doctors told me I had a colon infection and I felt
exhausted, but I just kept going. I could have died — normally when your
appendix bursts it causes peritonitis, which kills you within a few days. I had
my appendix out, spent a couple of days in hospital on morphine,
hallucinating — I’m not going to lie, I quite enjoyed that part — and a few
weeks in Nice recuperating, then went back on the road. It’s just how I am. If
I hadn’t got the constitution I have, all the drugs I took would have killed me
decades ago.

The oncologist told me I had two options. One was surgery to remove my
prostate. The other was a course of radiation and chemotherapy that meant I
would have to keep going back to hospital dozens of times. I went straight for
the surgery. A lot of men won’t have it, because it’s a major operation, you
can’t have sex for at least a year afterwards and you can’t control your
bladder for a while, but effectively my kids made the decision for me. I didn’t
like the idea of cancer hanging over me — us — for years to come: I just
wanted rid of it.

I had the surgery done in Los Angeles, quickly and quietly. We made sure
that news of my illness didn’t reach the press: the last thing I wanted was a
load of hysterical stories in the papers and photographers outside my house.
The operation was a complete success. They discovered that the cancer had
spread to two lobes in my prostate; targeted radiotherapy wouldn’t have
caught that. I had made the right decision. I was back onstage at Caesar’s
Palace within ten days.

It wasn’t until I arrived in Las Vegas that I noticed something wasn’t
right. I woke in the morning feeling a little uncomfortable. As the day
progressed, the pain got worse and worse. By the time I was backstage at the
gig, it was indescribable. I was in tears. The band suggested we should cancel
the show, but I said no. Before you start marvelling at my bravery and
nonpareil professionalism, I should point out that I didn’t agree to play out of
any show-must-go-on stoicism or sense of duty. Weirdly, getting onstage
seemed preferable to sitting at home with nothing to do in exactly the same
pain. So we went on. It sort of worked. At least the gig gave me something
else to think about other than how ill I felt, not least at the aforementioned
moment when I realized that the radical prostatectomy’s after-effects on my
bladder were making themselves known.

That was pretty funny — if only the audience knew — but nevertheless, if
pissing yourself in front of 4,000 people constitutes the highlight of your day,
you’re clearly in a bad way. It turned out that I was suffering a rare and
unexpected complication from the operation: fluid was leaking from my
lymph nodes. I had it drained at the hospital and the pain went away. The
fluid built up again and the pain came back. Fabulous: another thrilling
evening of agony and incontinence onstage at Caesar’s Palace. The cycle
went on for two and a half months, before they cured it by accident: a routine
colonoscopy shifted the fluid permanently, days before my seventieth
birthday.

My party was at the Red Studios in Hollywood. David brought Zachary
and Elijah over from London as a surprise. Ryan Adams, Rosanne Cash and
Lady Gaga performed. Prince Harry sent a video, wishing me all the best
while wearing a pair of Elton John glasses. Stevie Wonder played for me,
having either forgotten about, or forgiven me for refusing to come out of my
bedroom the last time he’d tried to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, on board the
Starship, forty-four years previously. And Bernie was there, with his wife and
two young daughters in tow — it was a kind of dual celebration, because it
was fifty years since we’d first met, in 1967. We posed for photographs
together — me in a maroon suit with satin lapels, a shirt with a ruff and velvet
slippers; Bernie dressed down in jeans, his hair cropped and his arms covered
in tattoos. We were as much a study in opposites now as we had been the day

Bernie first turned up in London from Owmby-by-Spital. Bernie had ended
up back in the countryside, on a ranch in Santa Barbara: he’d half gone back
to his roots and half turned into one of the Old West characters he loved to
write about, like something off Tumbleweed Connection. He literally won
competitions for roping cattle. I collected porcelain, and the Tate Modern was
staging an exhibition drawn from the vast selection of twentieth-century
photography I had amassed: one of the star exhibits was the original Man Ray
photograph Bernie and I had bought a poster of when we were trying to
decorate our shared bedroom in Frome Court. We were worlds apart. I don’t
know how it all still worked between us, but then, I never understood how it
worked in the first place. It just did. It just does.

It was a magical evening. I can usually live without the kind of event that
revolves around everyone telling me how wonderful I am — I’ve never been
good at taking a compliment — but I was in a fantastic mood. I was cancer-
free, and pain-free. The operation had been a success. The complications had
been fixed. I was about to go back on tour, down to South America to play
some shows with James Taylor. Everything was back to normal.

Until I nearly died.

we

It was on the flight back from Santiago that I started feeling ill. We had to
change planes in Lisbon, and by the time I got on board, I felt feverish. Then
I felt freezing cold. I couldn’t stop shaking. I wrapped myself up in blankets
and felt a littke warmer, but something clearly wasn’t right. I got home to
Woodside and called the doctor. My fever had subsided a bit, and he advised
me to take some rest. The next morning I woke up feeling worse than I ever
had in my life. I was taken to King Edward VII’s Hospital in London. They
gave me a scan and noticed that something was terribly wrong. I was told that
my condition was so serious, the hospital didn’t have the equipment to cope
with it. I had to be moved to the London Clinic.

I arrived at midday. My last memory is of hyperventilating while they
were trying to find a vein to give me an injection. I have really muscular
arms, so it’s always been difficult, compounded by the fact that I hate
needles. Eventually they brought in a Russian nurse, who looked like she had

just changed into her uniform after a morning’s training with the Olympic
shot put team, and by two thirty I was on the operating table: there was more
lymphatic fluid leaking, this time in my diaphragm, and it had to be drained.
For two days afterwards, I was in intensive care. When I came round, they
told me I had contracted a major infection in South America, and that they
were treating it with massive doses of antibiotics, intravenously. Everything
seemed to be fine, and then the fever came back. They took a sample of the
infection and grew it in a Petri dish. It was much more serious than they had
first realized; they had to change the antibiotics, up the dosage. I had MRI
scans and God knows how many other procedures. I just lay there feeling
terrible, being wheeled here and there, having tubes stuck in me and taken out
again, not really taking in what was going on. The doctors told David I was
twenty-four hours away from death. If the South American tour had gone on
for another day, that would have been it: brown bread.

I was incredibly lucky — I had a fantastic team around me and the best
possible medical care — although, I have to say, I didn’t exactly think of
myself as terribly lucky at the time. I couldn’t sleep. All I can really
remember is lying in bed, awake all night, wondering if I was going to die. I
didn’t know the details, didn’t know how close I really was to dying — David
had very wisely kept that information to himself — but how ill I felt in itself
was enough to get me thinking about mortality. This wasn’t how or when I
wanted to go. I wanted to die at home, surrounded by my family, preferably
having lived to an enormously advanced age first. I wanted to see the boys
again. I needed more time.

After eleven days I was allowed to leave. I couldn’t walk — there were
shooting pains down my legs — and the sheer quantity and power of the
antibiotics I had to take wiped me out completely, but at least I was home. I
spent seven weeks recuperating, learning to walk again. I never left the house
unless it was to see a doctor. It was the kind of forced leisure that would
ordinarily have driven me up the wall — I couldn’t remember the last time I’d
spent this long at home — but, as ill as I felt, I found I really enjoyed it. It was
springtime, and the gardens at Woodside looked beautiful. There were far, far
worse places in the world to be trapped. I settled into a kind of domestic
routine, pottering around the grounds and enjoying the garden during the day,

waiting for the boys to come home from school and give me their news.

In the hospital, alone at the dead of night, I’d prayed: please don’t let me
die, please let me see my kids again, please give me a little longer. In a
strange way, it felt like the time I spent recuperating was the answer to my
prayers: if you want more time, you need to learn to live like this, you have to
slow down. It was like being shown a different life, a life I realized I loved
more than being on the road. Any lingering doubts I might have had about
retiring from touring just evaporated. I knew I had made the right decision.
Music was the most wonderful thing, but it still didn’t sound as good as
Zachary chattering about what had happened at Cubs or football practice. I
couldn’t carry on pretending I was twenty-two anymore. Pretending I was
twenty-two was going to do what drugs and alcohol and cancer had failed to
achieve, and kill me. And I wasn’t ready to die yet.

epilogue

The farewell tour kicked off on 8 September 2018 in Allentown,
Pennsylvania. David had pulled together exactly the lavish celebration I
wanted. There was an incredible set, and he had commissioned a series of
amazing films to accompany the songs: animations that made the cover of
Captain Fantastic come to life, old footage of me from every stage of my
career and edgy films made by contemporary artists. Tony King was on hand
to cast his eye over them, and ensure they all looked perfect: half a century
after he first wafted into my life, looking extraordinary, I still trusted his
aesthetic sense implicitly. The reviews were incredible — the last time I’d had
notices like that, I had a full head of hair and the critic had to spend half the
piece explaining who I was. The loveliest thing was the sense of affection
about them, a real sadness that I’d decided to stop touring, that an era was
drawing to a close.

Midway through the first dates, I saw a rough version of the biopic,
Rocketman, for the first time. David was visibly incredibly nervous about my
reaction. I knew that Taron Egerton was the right man to play me when I
heard him sing ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ — he managed to get
through it without threatening to murder anyone or screaming about
Engelbert Humperdinck, which was certainly an improvement on the first
time I sang it. I’'d invited Taron to Woodside and chatted with him over a
takeaway curry, and I let him read some of the old diaries I’d kept in the early
seventies to give him a sense of what my life was like then. Those diaries are
inadvertently hilarious. I wrote down everything in this incredibly matter-of-
fact way, which just makes it seem even more preposterous. ‘Got up. Tidied

the house. Watched football on TV. Wrote “Candle In The Wind”. Went to
London. Bought Rolls-Royce. Ringo Starr came for dinner.’ I suppose I was
trying to normalize what was happening to me, despite the fact that what was
happening to me clearly wasn’t normal at all.

But I’d kept away from the set and tried to avoid looking at the rushes:
the last thing you want is the person you’re playing gawping at you while
you’re pretending to be him. But watching the film was like the first time I
saw Billy Elliot all over again: I started sobbing during the scene set in my
gran’s house in Pinner Hill Road, where my mum and dad and gran are
singing ‘I Want Love’. That was a song Bernie had written about himself, a
middle-aged man with a few failed marriages behind him, wondering if he’ll
ever fall in love again. But it could have been written about the people who
lived in that house. It felt right, and that was the really important thing to me.
It’s the same as this book: I wanted something my kids could watch or read in
forty years’ time, and find out what my life was like, or what it felt like to
me.

When the farewell tour was announced, a number of journalists had
written pieces suggesting that there was absolutely no way I would really
retire. They supported this argument with extensive knowledge of my history
and impressive psychological insights into my character: tried to retire
before, addictive personality, born entertainer, music obsessive. They could
have supported it even more strongly by repeating what I’d said at the press
conference, which was that I had no intention whatsoever of actually retiring
from music, or even live performances. All I said was that I wasn’t going to
schlep around the world any more: one last huge tour — 300 gigs over three
years, covering North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and
Australasia, the kids getting a tutor and coming with us — and that’s that.

It isn’t the end. I was excited by the fact that stopping touring would give
me more time to do different things. I want to write more musicals and more
film scores. I want to spend time working with the AIDS Foundation,
especially in Africa. I want to stand up for the LGBTQ community there, to
try and talk to politicians in Uganda or Kenya or Nigeria and do something to
change the way people are treated. I want to collaborate with different artists.
I want to stage a huge exhibition, covering my whole career, maybe even

think about opening a permanent museum, so people can see some of my art
and photography collections. I want to spend more time making albums, and
to make them in the way I used to at the start of my solo career: get Bernie to
spend time writing a lot of lyrics and develop a stockpile of material. I
haven’t gone into the studio with a big hoard of songs to choose from since
Madman Across the Water, forty-eight years ago — I’ve just turned up and
written on the spot, like the musical version of a painter with a blank canvas.
I want to go back to writing without recording what I’m doing, the same way
we made Captain Fantastic, memorizing what I come up with as I go along. I
want to play live, but much smaller shows, where I can concentrate on
playing different material. If there’s a problem with writing songs like ‘I’m
Still Standing’, or ‘Rocket Man’, or ‘Your Song’ it’s that they become so
huge; they develop a life of their own and overwhelm everything else you do.
I love those songs to death, but I’ve written other songs I think are as good as
them, that exist in their shadow, and I'd like to give those other songs a
moment in the spotlight.

But most of all, I want to spend time being ... well, normal, or as normal
as I can ever hope to be. Less time on the road means more time doing the
school run, more Saturday afternoons taking the kids to Pizza Express, or
round Daniel’s, the department store in Windsor — things the boys enjoy,
things I would once never have thought of doing. I spent my whole life trying
to run away from Reg Dwight, because Reg Dwight really wasn’t a happy
budgie. But what running away from Reg Dwight taught me is that when I
got too far from him, too removed from the normal person I once was, things
went horribly wrong; I was more miserable than ever. I need — everybody
needs — some connection to reality.

I live and have lived an extraordinary life, and I honestly wouldn’t change
it, even the parts I regret, because I’m incredibly happy with how it has
turned out. I obviously wish I’d just kept walking when I saw John Reid
chopping out coke in the studio, rather than sticking my nose in — in every
sense of the phrase — but then, maybe I had to go through all that to end up
where I am now. It’s not where I expected to be at all — married to a man, a
father of two, both things that seemed impossible to me not that long ago. But
that’s the other lesson my ridiculous life has taught me. From the moment I

was ushered out of a failed audition and handed an envelope of Bernie’s
lyrics as I got to the door, nothing has ever really turned out how I thought it
would. My history is full of what ifs, weird little moments that changed
everything. What if I’d been so upset by failing my audition that I’d dumped
Bernie’s envelope in a bin on the way to the station? What if I’d stood firm
and not gone to America when Dick James told me I should? What if
Watford had beaten West Bromwich Albion that Saturday afternoon in the
early nineties and lifted my spirits, so that I didn’t feel the need to call a
friend and beg him to bring some gay men to dinner? What if I hadn’t noticed
Lev at the orphanage in Ukraine? Where would I be now? Who would I be
now?

You can send yourself crazy wondering. But it all happened, and here I
am. There’s really no point in asking what if? The only question worth asking
is: what’s next?

Aged one, in 1948.

PE > LL.

ABS Jie

With my mother, Sheila Dwight, in the back garden of my nan’s house at 55 Pinner Hill Road.

Outside Buckingham Palace with my mum and my grandad Fred Harris, June 1950.

Me and my dad, in a rare moment when he wasn’t complaining about the disastrous effects of Little
Richard on my moral character;

Me, conspicuously ordinary, at Pinner County Grammar.

{ae
Bluesology in 1965. A photo used on the sheet music for our single ‘Come Back Baby’, printed in the
demented belief that anyone other than Bluesology was going to sing it.

The brother I’d never had. Bernie with my cousin Paul and my mercifully short-lived moustache. Mum,
Auntie Win and Auntie Mavis are on the back row;

Frome Court, where Bernie and I lived with Mum and Derf in the upstairs flat.

April 1969, in front of my new Hillman Husky estate.

The genius arranger Paul Buckmaster demonstrating his striking approach to style during the Elton
John album sessions, 1970.

A promo shot of me and Bernie, taken in summer 1970, as a buzz started building around the new
album.

Taratscrse tales
La tile

The Troubadour, 1970. If I’d had my way, I’d have gone home in a huff without actually playing there.

The night everything changed. Onstage at the Troubadour in my yellow dungarees and star-spangled T-
shirt.

~

My hero. Me with Leon Russell in New York, 1970. Imagine that face glaring at you throughout the
most important gig of your life.

4 . = ’ ‘ WK exe FF

+ ) Go 5 AE

Sharon and Beryl. Me and John Reid, young and in love, 1972.

I learned a lot about art from Bryan Forbes. Here I am, visibly embarking on another voyage of
discovery in his Virginia Water bookshop.

Backstage at the Shaw Theatre with Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon. Princess
Margaret invited me and the band to a memorable dinner party.

Dee, me, Davey and Nigel at the Chateau d’Hérouville in 1972. Note my idea of dressing down for a
recording session.

Britain’s least likely pop star accepts his gold discs. Stephen James, Bernie, me and Dick James at the
DJM offices.

With my lovely nan, Ivy Sewell;

Doing my best to upstage Rod Stewart, as usual.

Her Royal Highness Tony King, with loyal subject John Lennon emerging from her skirts.

Luggage tags from the SS France trip, where I wrote Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy by
day, and took on all-comers at bingo by night.

od

Rehearsing with John at the Record Plant, NYC, the day before the Thanksgiving show at Madison
Square Garden.

ca n7z2olU
—_ _

On the runway with the Starship, freshly repainted to my specifications.

‘I won’t be able to sing in it? You let me worry about that’: the master of shy understatement takes the
stage, mid-70s.

Driving a gold-painted golf cart with illuminated glasses and a bow tie on the front to the unveiling of
my star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. You can see how overjoyed I was by this turn of events.

With the wonderful Billie Jean King and Bernie, respectively the inspiration for, and the writer of,
‘Philadelphia Freedom’.

With Bernie at Tower Grove Drive, LA, in the 1970s. The ongoing effects of a disastrous hair-dye
experiment on the John cranium are clearly visible.

Onstage with Stevie Wonder, Wembley, 1977. Unbeknown to everybody present, I’m about to
announce my retirement from live performance, yet again.

Yi

clearly early in the evening because both my eyeballs are pointing in the same direction.

In Leningrad with Ray Cooper in 1979.

Wearing the Donald Duck costume, in which I couldn’t walk or sit down properly, playing Central Park
in September 1980.

The other great partnership of my career: Watford manager Graham Taylor discusses tactics with the
chairman, 1983.

Backstage at Live Aid with the magnificent Freddie Mercury, who had both just stolen the show and
blithely informed me I looked like the Queen Mother onstage.

George Michael wanted to leave the frivolity of pop music behind — so naturally I turned up at
Wham!’s farewell concert in June 1986 dressed as Ronald McDonald.

iit’

Bernie and me with Ryan White in 1988. I didn’t know it then, but meeting Ryan was going to save my
life.

Clean and sober, but still intent on ruining things for Rod Stewart whenever possible. I’m about to
wander onstage unannounced and sit on his lap.

Taken by Herb Ritts in 1992. I’d known Liz Taylor for years — she was hilarious, and had the guts to
force Hollywood to pay attention to AIDS long before I did.

Backstage at Earls Court with Princess Diana in May 1993;

Working with Tim Rice on The Lion King. I thought the finished film was extraordinary.

With David Furnish, madly in love and fully Versace’ d;

David, Gianni Versace, me and Gianni’s partner Antonio D’Amico at Gianni’s home on Lake Como.

The Oscar party fundraisers for my AIDS Foundation started in 1993 and have become a yearly event.
This is from the tenth party, with Denzel Washington and Halle Berry, who won best actor and best
actress that night.

1996.

’

shot by Mario Testino at the Ritz Paris

David and me,

Mum and Derf with me and David the day I received my knighthood in 1998.

Ingrid Sischy, who felt like my missing sister when I met her, demonstrating the transformative power
of one of my wigs.

ce .
21 December 2005: the day David and I became civil partners. I was as happy as I had ever been;

I was genuinely worried we’d be facing crowds of protesters outside the Guildhall in Windsor but
people turned up with cakes and presents.

With Auntie Win at the party after our civil partnership. Mum, being an appalling pain in the arse, is
not pictured.

Our son Zachary taking his first steps in 2011 in Los Angeles.

Having breakfast with Zachary in Nice. Fatherhood was the most unexpected event of my life — and
the best.

Passing on my expertise in shopping to the boys.

Lady Gaga, underdressed as usual, performing godmother duties.

Bring your kids to work day. Zachary and Elijah onstage with me at Caesars Palace in Vegas.

Backstage with Aretha Franklin before her final live performance at the Elton John AIDS Foundation
twenty-fifth anniversary gala in New York, November 2017.

Backstage at the farewell tour with Bernie, 2018. Still a study in opposites fifty years on. Still best
friends.

acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone who jogged my memory and who contributed to my
amazing life.

index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the
pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device
to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the
print index are listed below.

Abbey Road Studios
Academy Awards Viewing Party
Ackles, David
Adams, Bryan
Adams, Ryan
Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, Chicago
After Dark club, Los Angeles
Aida musical
AIDS/HIV
And the Band Played On docudrama
Elton’s work; see also Elton John AIDS Foundation
fear of
Princess Diana’s work
in Russia
Ryan White
in South Africa
in the Ukraine
AIR company
AIR Studios
albums
Bernie as sole lyricist
Big Picture, The
Captain and the Kid, The
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
Caribou
Diving Board, The
Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player
Elton John

Empty Sky
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Honky Chateau
Ice on Fire (‘Wrap Her Up’ as multiple writers)
Made in England
Madman Across the Water
One, The (‘Runaway Train’ by John/Taupin/Romo)
Peachtree Road
Reg Strikes Back
Rock of the Westies
Sleeping with the Past
Songs from the West Coast
Too Low for Zero
Tumbleweed Connection
Wonderful Crazy Night
Bernie plus other lyricists
21 at 33
Blue Moves
Fox, The
Jump Up!
Leather Jackets
collaborations
Duets (with various artists)
Good Morning to the Night (with Pnau)
Union, The (with Leon Russell)
compilation albums
To Be Continued ...
Elton John’s Greatest Hits
disco album, Victim of Love
live albums
11-17-70
Here and There
Live in Australia
soundtracks and musicals
Aida
Billy Elliot
Friends
Lion King, The
Muse, The
Road to El Dorado
Vampire Lestat, The
Women Talking Dirty
Alexandra, Princess
Almost Famous film
American Foundation for AIDS Research
Anderson, Jon
Andrews, Bernie
Andrews, Julie

Andy Williams Show

Anne, Princess Royal

‘Are You Ready For Love’ (Bell/Bell/James)
Armani, Giorgio

Artem in the Ukraine

Ashe, Arthur

Ashen, John

Atwell, Winifred

Auger, Brian

Average White Band

Babylon, Guy
‘Back In The USSR’ (Lennon/McCartney)
‘Back To The Island’ (Russell)
Bag O’ Nails pub
Baldry, Long John
Band, The
Barbis, Eddi
Barbis, Johnny
Barnes, John
Barron Knights, The
Bassett, Dave
Beach Boys, The
Beatles, The
Beck, Jeff
Bell, Thom
Bellotte, Pete
Billy Elliot film
Billy Elliot musical
Birch, Bob
Birdsong, Cindy
Blauel, Renate
after divorce
album work
divorce
engagement
wedding and reception
Blissett, Luther
Blue Mink
Bluesology
clubs
Elton leaving band
front artists
in Hamburg
inferiority
with Long John Baldry
low pay

manager

organ problems

recordings

starting out

working for Tempest

workload
Blunt, James
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (Mercury)
Bolan, Marc
Bond, Isabel
Bowie, David
Boy club, Paris
Branson, Richard
Brant, Sandy
Brett, Jeremy
Brown, Steve
Brown, Stuart
Buck, Vance
Buckmaster, Paul
Burchett, Guy
Burdon, Eric
Burns, Shirley
Byron, David

Caddy, Alan
Caesar’s Palace residencies, Las Vegas
Million Dollar Piano, The
Red Piano, The
Callaghan, Nigel
Carey, George, Archbishop of Canterbury
Caribou Ranch studio, Colorado
Cash, Rosanne
Cedars-Sinai hospital, Los Angeles
Chapman, Beth Nielsen
Charles, Prince of Wales
Charles, Ray
Chateau d’Hérouville, France
Chelsea FC
Cher
China (band)
Clapton, Eric
Clough, Brian
cocaine
Cohen, Leonard
Collins, Phil
‘Come Back Baby’ (Dwight)
concerts; see also tours

benefit concerts
Central Park, New York
Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles
first Troubadour show
Freddie Mercury Tribute concert
George Michael’s Wembley shows
Hollywood Bowl
Las Vegas shows
Madison Square Garden with John Lennon as guest
Midsummer Music event, London
Royal Variety Performance
Cooper, Alice
Cooper, Ray
Cornelius, Don
Corvettes, The
Costello, Elvis
Cox, Patrick
Crosby, David
Curtis, Richard

Daily Mail
Daily Mirror
Dakota Building, New York
Daldry, Stephen
D’ Amico, Antonio
Dean, Elton
Dee, Kiki
Delaney and Bonnie
Delfont, Bernard
Denmark Street, London
Denny, Sandy
Derek And The Dominos
Derek (EJ’s driver)
Diamond, Neil
Diana, Princess of Wales
‘Candle In The Wind’ (for Princess Diana)
death
Diana Effect
falling out with Elton
funeral
at Prince Andrew’s birthday party
reconciliation with Elton
singing with Versace
social ease
at Versace’s funeral
at Woodside party
Dick James Music (DJM); see also James, Dick

disco
Disney Studios
Divine
‘Don’t Give Up’ (Gabriel/Bush)
Double Fantasy (Lennon/Ono)
Dr John
drag names
DreamWorks
Driscoll, Julie
Dudgeon, Gus
Duran Duran
Dury, Ian
Dwight, Roy
Dwight, Sheila (EJ’s mum); see also Farebrother, Sheila (EJ’s mum)
childrearing practices
and ‘Derf’; see also Farebrother, Sheila (EJ’s mum)
divorce from Elton’s dad
and Elton’s dad
Elton’s fear of
Elton’s relationship with Linda Woodrow
Elton’s sexuality
house moves
love of music
support for Elton’s music career
temper and sulks
Dwight, Stanley (EJ’s dad)
anger at Elton’s career choice
catching Elton masturbating
death
divorce from Elton’s mum
and Elton’s mum
Elton’s relationship with
hatred of rock ‘n’ roll
illness
love of football
remarriage and family
separation from Elton’s mum
Dylan, Bob
Dynamic Sounds Studios, Kingston, Jamaica

Eagles, The

Ebert, Roger

Egerton, Taron

Elizabeth II

Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
Elliot, Mama Cass

Elton John AIDS Foundation

Academy Awards Viewing Party
in Africa
Aretha at 25th anniversary gala
Elton speaking to US Congress
funds raised so far
‘Out of the Closet’ fundraiser
Princess Diana as patron
Rock and Royalty (Versace)
Rush Limbaugh wedding
in Russia
Smash Hits tennis tournament
starting
in the Ukraine

Elton John Band
firing
intuition and cohesion
line-up changes
original trio
original trio plus

Eminem

Eurovision Song Contest

Fairport Convention
Fame, Georgie
Farebrother, Fred (‘Derf’)
death
dinner with John Lennon
Elton and David’s civil partnership ceremony
Elton’s engagement to Renate
Elton’s sexuality
Elton’s Woodside house
house moves
LA Elton John Week
lunch to meet David
marriage to Elton’s mum
Russian tour
starting relationship with Elton’s mum
support for Elton’s music career
Farebrother, Sheila (EJ’s mum); see also Dwight, Sheila (EJ’s mum)
Bob Halley issue
criticism of Elton
death
Elton and David’s civil partnership ceremony and reception
Elton’s engagement to Renate
Elton’s Woodside house
Elvis Presley
falling out with family

funeral
against gay civil partnerships
hating The Red Piano show
house moves
jealousy of David
LA Elton John Week
last meeting with Elton
at lunch to meet David
lunch with Elton at Woodside
marriage to ‘Derf’
mixed personality
no interest in grandsons
Russian tour
Tantrums and Tiaras film
temper and sulks
Farm Aid concert
Fontana, Wayne, and The Mindbenders
football
Forbes, Bryan
Fotheringay
France, SS
Francis, Keith
Franklin, Aretha
Franks, Clive
Friends soundtrack
Fulham FC
Furnish, David; see also John—Furnish relationship
Billy Elliot musical idea
biopic of Elton
birth of son Elijah
birth of son Zachary
coming out to family
Elton’s Farewell Tour
Elton’s heart problems
as Elton’s manager
Elton’s near-fatal illness
Elton’s seventieth birthday party
friendship with Versace
Gere and Stallone at Woodside
helping others
lunch to meet Elton’s family
marriage to Elton
meeting Elton
musical interests
Princess Diana’s funeral
rehabilitation
reservations about relationship with Elton
Rocketman film

security concerns
Tantrums and Tiaras documentary
‘touring or parenting’ choice
Women Talking Dirty film
Furnish, Gladys
Furnish, Jack
Furnish-John, Elijah
Furnish-John, Zachary

Gaff, Billy

Gaga, Lady
Garcia, Jerry
Garfunkel, Art
Garnier, Laurent
Gates, John
Gavin, Pete

gay clubs

Geffen Records
Geller, Uri

Gere, Richard
Gibb, Maurice
Gibb, Robin
Gilbert, John
Gillespie, Dana
Glotzer, Bennett
Goldsmith, Harvey
Graham, Bill
Grateful Dead, The
Greco, Buddy
Grossman, Albert
Guetta, David
Guns N’ Roses

Hall, Lee

Halley, Bob

Halley, Pearl

Halperin, Bruce

Hammond organs
harpsichords

Harrison, George

Harrow Granada

Harry, Prince, Duke of Sussex
Harty, Russell

Heart, Harry

‘Heartbreak Hotel’ (Axton, Durden Presley)
Heartbreaker (Adams)

Heath, Edward

‘He’ll Have To Go’ (Allison/Allison)
Henley, Don

Hepburn, Katharine
Hewitson, Mike

Hilburn, Robert

Hill, Andy

Hiller, Tony

HIV/AIDS see AIDS/HIV
Holly, Buddy

Hollywood Walk of Fame
Hoochie Coochie Men, The
Hookfoot

Houston, Whitney

Howard, James Newton
Hunt, Marsha

Hurley, Elizabeth

Hutton, Danny

‘I’m Not In Love’ (Stewart/Gouldman)
Ink Spots, The

Inkpen, Mick

Inn On The Park, London

Interview magazine

Iovine, Jimmy

Island Records

Jackson, Michael
Jackson, Steve
Jagger, Mick
Jahr, Cliff
James, Dick; see also Dick James Music (DJM)
American tour
belief in Elton and Bernie
Bernie’s poetry album
court case against
death
debut single
Elton and Bernie signing with
Elton John album
Empty Sky album
end of contract
Eurovision Song Contest
turing down Jeff Beck offer
James, Stephen
John—Furnish relationship
civil partnership
EJ’s mother’s behaviour

joint stag party
morning of ceremony
proposal
reception plans
David as manager
early days
first date
first meeting
Lev in the Ukraine
marriage
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame episode
son Elijah
son Zachary
wanting children
John—Taupin relationship
fifty years on
first meeting
friendship
closeness
EJ in rehab
EJ’s 1968 suicide attempt
EJ’s breakup with Linda
EJ’s marriage to Renate

EJ’s relationship with Linda Woodrow

EJ’s seventieth birthday party
EJ’s substance abuse

life at Frome Court

move back to Frome Court

recording; see also albums; songs/singles

Rocket Records
songwriting
albums see albums
beginning of partnership

Big Picture, The, disagreement about

break from writing together
early days
improvements
influences
meeting with Steve Brown
songs/singles see songs/singles
writing again after break
writing method

on tour

JOHN, ELTON

LIFE EVENTS
1947, birth
1950s

hearing Elvis for first time

Reddiford School
1950s/1960s
piano playing and lessons
Pinner County Grammar School
rock ’n’ roll, advent of
Royal Academy of Music
1960s
Victoria Wine job
session work
1961, parents’ divorce and new partners
1962, Northwood Hills Hotel gig
1963, Mills Music publishing job
1967
Liberty Records audition
meeting Bernie Taupin
1968
signed to DIM
engagement to/breakup with Linda Woodrow
suicide attempt
Baldry telling him he is gay
sexual awakening
1969
meeting with Steve Brown
Eurovision Song Contest
Elton John Band formed
1970
first US tour
meeting Leon Russell
losing virginity
setting up home with John Reid
coming out to family and friends
John Reid becoming manager
1972
changing name
glandular fever
1973
gorilla outfit at Stooges show
meeting John Lennon
1974
Rocket Records started
starting to use cocaine
New Zealand arrest
aboard SS France
on Lennon’s Walls and Bridges album
Lennon onstage at MSG
1975
breaking up with John Reid
LA Elton John Week

suicide attempts
1976

meeting Elvis

exhaustion

Rolling Stone interview

coming out to public

buying Watford FC

having Queen Mother to lunch
1977

break from writing with Bernie

working with Thom Bell

retirement announcement at Wembley
1978, working with Gary Osborne
1980

working with Tom Robinson

hearing of John Lennon’s murder
1981

meeting Princess Diana

Prince Andrew’s birthday party
1983

safari with Rod Stewart

travel to China with Watford FC
1984, engagement and gets married to Renate Blauel
1985-1986, voice problems
1986, possible throat cancer diagnosis
1987

throat surgery

bulimia

Sun newspaper vendetta
1988

divorce from Renate

Sotheby’s auctions
1990

death of Ryan White

asking for help
1990-1991, rehabilitation see John, Elton, rehabilitation
1991

death of father

death of Freddie Mercury

meeting John Scott

starting to work again
1992

starting Elton John AIDS Foundation

record collection auction
1993

meeting David Furnish

lunch to introduce David to parents
1994, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction

1994/1997, The Lion King film and musical
1997
fiftieth birthday party
Gianni Versace’s murder and funeral
hearing about Princess Diana’s death
Princess Diana’s funeral
1998
knighthood
VH1 Divas Live show
touring with Billy Joel
end of business relationship with John Reid Enterprises
1999, heart problems
2001, Songs from the West Coast
2004, beginning Caesar’s Palace residency
2005
civil partnership proposal to David
civil partnership ceremony and reception
2007, sixtieth birthday party
2010s
collaborations
David becoming manager
deaths of friends
2010
Rush Limbaugh wedding
birth of son Zachary
2011-2017, Million Dollar Piano shows, Las Vegas
2012, Good Morning to the Night album (with Pnau)
2013
birth of son Elijah
burst appendix
2014
marriage to David
mother’s death and funeral
2017
‘touring or parenting’ choice
prostate cancer and aftereffects
seventieth birthday party
nearly lethal infection
2018-2019
Rocketman film
Farewell Tour
AIDS work
Academy Awards Viewing Party
benefit concerts
Elton John AIDS Foundation see Elton John AIDS Foundation
Operation Open Hand
royalty donations
in Russia

Ryan White
US Congress, speeches to
albums see albums
band see Elton John Band
bands, early; see also Bluesology
bulimia
childhood home environment
children
fear of parenting
godchildren
lessons from
Lev in the Ukraine
love of
Noosa in South Africa
options for having children
paternal instinct kicking in
preparing for first child
privileges and burdens
son Elijah born
son Zachary born
surrogacy
‘touring or parenting’ choice
concerts see concerts; tours
diaries
eyesight
family
Auntie Win
ex-wife see Blauel, Renate
father see Dwight, Stanley (EJ’s dad)
husband see Furnish, David; John-Furnish relationship
mother see Dwight, Sheila (EJ’s mum); Farebrother, Sheila (EJ’s mum)
Nan (maternal grandmother)
paternal grandparents
son Elijah
son Zachary
step-grandfather Horace
stepdad ‘Derf’ see Farebrother, Fred (‘Derf’)
Uncle Reg
future, plans for the
homes
Atlanta, Georgia
Holland Park, London
Islington, Furlong Road
Los Angeles
Nice
Virginia Water, Surrey
Water Gardens, Edgware Road
west London

Woodside, Old Windsor see Woodside, Old Windsor
homes, parental
Croxley Green
Frome Court
Northwood
Wiltshire
interests outside music
collecting things
art
books, comics, magazines
enjoyment from
furniture
out of control
photography
records
football
shopping
squash and tennis
name
as performer
Farewell Tour
fearlessness
grand entrances
headliner
identity
love of performing
nerves
onstage antics
retirement decision
walking out of concerts
wardrobe and appearance
personality traits
bottling things up
competitive streak
fear of being alone
fear of confrontation
gift-giving, love of
gregariousness
helping others; see also John, Elton, philanthropy
honesty
orderliness
self-appearance, insecurity about
self-doubt/self-criticism
stubbornness
temper
willingness to work with opposers
pets
philanthropy

AIDS work
benefit concerts
charity singles
collection sales donations
lawsuit awards donated to charity
Royal Academy of Music
royalty donations
physical appearance
hair/wigs/hair-pieces
wardrobe (offstage)
wardrobe (onstage)
record charts, following
rehabilitation
addiction meetings
happiness
helping others
letter to cocaine
at Lutheran Rehab Center, Chicago
psychiatrist meetings
walks in London
romantic relationships
Blauel, Renate see Blauel, Renate
fleeting
Fumish, David see Furnish, David
Reid, John
Scott, John
Williams, Hugh
Woodrow, Linda
sexual exploration
sexual naivety
songs/singles see songs/singles
substance abuse; see also John, Elton, rehabilitation
alcohol
cannabis
cocaine
television appearances
tours see tours
videos
Watford FC
Johnson, Michael
Johnstone, Davey
Jones, Mrs (piano teacher)
Jones, Quincy
Jopling, Jay

Kanga, Skaila
Katzenberg, Jeffrey

Katzenberg, Marilyn
Kenton Conservative Club
Key, Robert
Khan, Chaka
Kiki and Herb
King, Billie Jean
King, Tony
AA meetings

after Freddie Mercury’s death

Amsterdam drug fest
Apple Records’ US manager
drag name ‘Joy’

dress and style

EJ and Renate’s wedding
EJ’s engagement to Renate
EJ’s Farewell Tour

EJ’s relationship with John Reid

EJ’s substance abuse

Elton and David’s civil partnership ceremony

friends met via
HIV/AIDS epidemic

Hollywood Bowl 1973 concert

homosexuality
‘I’m Not In Love’ gold disc
John Lennon
LA Elton John Week
Las Vegas shows
mescaline
session work for EJ
Kinison, Sam
Kitt, Eartha
Kloss, Ilana
Knight, Gladys
KPPC radio
Kramer, Larry
Krumlin Festival, Yorkshire

LA Times

LaBelle, Patti

LaChapelle, David

Lance, Major

Larkham, David

Latino Club, South Shields
Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles
Lawrence, Sharon

Le Bon, Simon

Leggatt, Julie

Lennon, Cynthia

Lennon, John

Lennon, Julian

Lennon, Sean

Leonard, Pat

‘Let The Heartaches Begin’ (Macaulay and Macleod)
Lev in the Ukraine

Lewis, Jerry Lee

Liberace

Liberty Records

Limbaugh, Rush

Lindsay-Hogg, Michael

Linley, Viscount David (now Earl Snowdon)
Lion King, The

Lippert, Patrick

Little Richard (Penniman)

London Clinic

London Palladium

Longdancer

Los Angeles Elton John Week (1975)

Los Angeles Free Press

‘Love Me Do’ (Lennon, McCartney)
Lovelace, Linda

Lowe, Tim

‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ (Lennon/McCartney) (EJ recording)
Lulu

McCartney, Paul

McCormack, Eric

McCreary, Peggy

McIntosh, Robbie

McKellen, Sir Ian

MacKenzie, Kelvin

Mackie, Bob

Madonna

Manuel, Richard

Marble Arch label

Margaret, Princess, Countess of Snowdon
Martha And The Vandellas

Martin, George

Marx, Groucho

Meadows rehab facility, Scottsdale, Arizona
Meaning of Life, The (Monty Python)
Mee, Bertie

Megson, Mr

Meldrum, Molly

Mellencamp, John

Mendes, Sérgio
Mercury, Freddie
Michael, George
Midlane, Kaye

Mike Sammes Singers
Milk and Honey (Lennon/Ono)
Mills Music publishing
Mind Games (Lennon)
Minnelli, Liza
Mirage, The

Mitchell, Joni
Montserrat studio
Moon, Keith
Moroder, Giorgio
Morris, Jim

Mothers Of Invention
Move, The

‘Mr Frantic’ (Dwight)
Mulcahy, Russell
Murray, Dee

Muse, The soundtrack
Musicland shop

Nash, Graham

Nelson, Willie
Newman, Nanette
Nilsson, Harry

Noosa

Northwood Hills Hotel
Nottingham Forest FC
Nutter, Tommy

Ogilvy and Mather
O’Grady, Paul
Olsson, Nigel

One to One show
Ono, Yoko

Operation Open Hand
Osborne, Gary
Osborne, Jenny
Osboume, Sharon

Page, Gene

Pang, May

Pappas, Connie
Parade article
Parkinson, Michael

Passarelli, Kenny
Peel, John

Pell, Benjamin
Perrin, Alain
Petchey, Jack

Philip, Prince, Duke of Edinburgh
Philips Records
Phillips, Arlene
Piena, Helen

Pinner County Grammar School
Plastic Penny
Plumley, Eddie

Pnau

Pop, Iggy

Pope, Roger
Presland, Frank
Presley, Elvis
Presley, Lisa Marie
Presley, Priscilla
Price, Alan

Price, Bill

Proby, P. J.
psychiatrists

Puk studio, Denmark
Punk Rock

Putin, Vladimir
Putot, Pierre

Quaye, Caleb
Queen

Rainbow Theatre, London
Reagan, Ronald
Reavey, Annie
Record Plant East studio, New York
Reed, Lou
Reeves, Martha
Reid, John
birthday party at Le Restaurant
career climb
deaths of friends
drag name ‘Beryl’
as EJ’s lover
as EJ’s manager
1977 retirement announcement
at concerts
continuing after breakup

ending DJM deal
end of business relationship
fight in Nice
finances, arguments over
firing staff
Russian tour
South Africa tour
EJ’s marriage to Renate
friendship with EJ’s mum
LA Elton John Week
Liberace concert
Rolling Stone 1976 interview
Tantrums and Tiaras documentary
Renwick, Tim
Rice, Tim
Richard, Cliff
Richards, Keith
Richie, Janet
‘Ride A White Swan’ (Bolan)
Ringler, Guy
Road to El Dorado soundtrack
Roberts, Tommy
Robertson, Robbie
Robinson, Smokey, and the Miracles
Robinson, Tom
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Rock and Royalty (Versace)
rock ‘n’ roll, advent of
Rocket Records
Rocketman film
Rockwell, John
Rolling Stone 1976 interview
Rolling Stones
Rose, Axl
Rose, Howard
Rosner, David and Margo
Rotten, Johnny
Royal Academy of Music
Rubell, Steve
Rufus
Russell, Leon

‘Sand And Water’ (Chapman)
Sasha the Soviet bodyguard
Scott, John

session work

Sex Pistols

Shears, Jake
Shephard, Matthew
Simon, Paul
Sischy, Ingrid
Smash Hits tennis fundraiser
Smith, ‘Legs’ Larry
Snowdon, Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl
Sobell, Michael
songs/singles
Bernie as sole lyricist
‘All The Nasties’
‘Amazes Me’
‘American Triangle’
‘Amy’
‘My Father’s Gun’
‘Border Song’
‘Candle In The Wind’ (for Princess Diana)
‘Cold As Christmas’
‘Country Comfort’
‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’
‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’
‘Ego’
‘Empty Garden’
‘Grow Some Funk Of Your Own’
‘Healing Hands’
‘Heartache All Over The World’
‘Hoop Of Fire’
‘I Fall Apart’
‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues’
‘I Never Knew Her Name’
‘I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself’
‘I Want Love’
‘I’m Always On The Bonk’
‘I’m Still Standing’
‘lve Been Loving You’
‘Kiss The Bride’
‘Lady Samantha’
‘Lady What’s Tomorrow’
‘Last Song, The’
‘Look Ma, No Hands’
‘Mona Lisas And Mad Hatters’
‘My Father’s Gun’
‘Nikita’
‘Philadelphia Freedom’
‘Rocket Man’
‘Sacrifice’
‘Sad Songs (Say So Much)’
‘Skyline Pigeon’

‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’
‘Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word’
“Take Me To The Pilot’
‘This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore’
“Tiny Dancer’
‘We All Fall In Love Sometimes’
‘White Lady White Powder’
“Your Song’
Elton as lyricist, ‘Song for Guy’
other lyricists
‘Are You Ready For Love’
‘Blue Eyes’
‘Can You Feel The Love
Tonight?’
‘Chloe’
‘Don’t Trust That Woman’
‘Elton’s Song’
‘Hakuna Matata’
‘Legal Boys’
‘Little Jeannie’
‘Sartorial Eloquence’
Sotheby’s auctions
Soul Train
South Harrow British Legion
South Park cartoon series
‘Space Oddity’ (Bowie)
Speakeasy club, London
Springfield, Dusty
Stacey, Bob
Stackridge
Stallone, Sylvester
Starr, Ringo
Starship plane
Steampacket
Steele, Polly
Stewart, Billy
Stewart, Dave
Stewart, Rod
art deco poster collection
dancing
drag name ‘Phyllis’
EJ’s friendship with
EJ’s wedding with Renate
ending romances
gigs together
Johnny Rotten’s views on
in Long John Baldry’s bands
Stiff Records

Stills, Stephen

Sting

Stone, Joss

Stonewall charity

Stooges, The

Street-Porter, Janet

Studio 54, New York

Studio One club, Los Angeles
Sun City, South Africa

Sun newspaper

‘Surprise Surprise’ (Lennon)

Tamla Motown label
Taupin, Bernie; see also John—Taupin relationship
1970 American tour
1974 Madison Square Garden
1975 Dodger Stadium concerts
‘Candle In The Wind’ for Princess Diana
Eurovision Song Contest
friendship with John Lennon
Maxine
meeting Elvis
move to Surrey
opinion on Linda Woodrow
poetry album
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Western US, interest in
work with Alice Cooper
Taupin, Maxine
Taupin, Toni
Taylor, Elizabeth
Taylor, Graham
Taylor-Wood, Sam
Taymor, Julie
‘Tears Of A Clown’ (Cosby/Robinson/Wonder)
television appearances
Tempest, Roy
Tendler, Arnold
‘That’s What Friends Are For’ (Bacharach) charity single
Thomas, Chris
Three Dog Night
Timberlake, Justin
Tonkin, Dr John
Too 2 Much club
Top of the Pops
Top Ten Club, Hamburg
Tornovoi, Vladislav

tours
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1976
1979
1980
1983
1986
1995
2011
2012
2018-2019 Farewell Tour
with Billy Joel
with Leon Russell
with Ray Cooper
Russia
Townshend, Pete
Trident Studio, London
Troggs, The
Troubadour, Los Angeles
Turner, Tina
‘Tutti Frutti’ (Penniman, LaBostrie)

Uni Records

Vampire Lestat, The musical
Vaughan, Stevie Ray
Venables, Terry

Versace, Allegra

Versace, Donatella

Versace, Gianni

VH1 Divas Live/99

Victoria Wine

videos

Voodoo Lounge (Rolling Stones)
Vox Continental organs

Wainwright, Rufus
Walden, Barry
Walker, Alan
Walsh, Joe
Warhol, Andy
Warwick, Dionne

Watford FC
Watson, Tom
Weisenfeld, Jason
West, Mae
Westgate-Smith, Mr
Weston, Carol
Weston, Doug
Wham!
‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’ (Lennon)
White, Andrea
White, Jeanne
White, Ryan
Whitlock, Bobby
Whitten, Bill
William, Prince, Duke of Cambridge
Williams, Hugh
Williams, Ray
Wilson, Brian
Winfrey, Oprah
Winter, Norman
Winwood, Muff
Winwood, Zena
WNEW radio
Women Talking Dirty soundtrack
Wonder, Stevie
Wood, Roy
Woodrow, Linda
Woodside, Old Windsor
buying and moving in
chapel
Christmases
civil partnership party
collections sale
disco
EJ’s mum’s funeral
EJ’s mum’s management
entertaining and parties
home
Queen Mother’s visit
recuperation at
renovations
squash court
staff
studio
wedding
Woodward, Edward
Wright, Steve

Young, Neil

Zeffirelli, Franco
Zito, Richie

picture acknowledgements

All photographs are from the author’s family or personal collection, with the exception of the
following:

Here: © Edna Dwight

Here: © Mercury Records Ltd

Here: © Mike Ross / Lickerish Syndication

Here: © Barrie Wentzell

Here: photographs courtesy of Rocket Entertainment

Here: photographs courtesy of Rocket Entertainment

Here: photograph by David Larkham

Here: photograph by Don Nix © OKPOP Collection / Steve Todoroff Archive

Here: © Bob Gruen / www.bobgruen.com

Here: © Anonymous / AP / Shutterstock

Here: © Michael Putland / Getty Images

Here: © Bryan Forbes

Here: © MARKA / Alamy Stock Photo

Here: © Sam Emerson (courtesy of Rocket Entertainment)

Here: © Sam Emerson (courtesy of Rocket Entertainment)

Here: © Sam Emerson (courtesy of Rocket Entertainment)

Here: © Sam Emerson (courtesy of Rocket Entertainment)

Here: © Sam Emerson (courtesy of Rocket Entertainment)

Here: © May Pang

Here: © Mike Hewitson

Here: © Terry O’ Neill / Iconic Images

Here: © Ron Galella / WireImage

Here: © Northcliffe Collection / ANL / Shutterstock

Here: © Chris Morris / Shutterstock

Here: © Alan Cozzi / courtesy of Watford FC

Here: © Richard Young

Here: © Pete Still / Redferns

Here: © Alan Berliner / Berliner Studio

Here: photograph by Eugene Adebari

Here: photograph by Herb Ritts © Herb Ritts Foundation

Here: © Richard Young / Shutterstock

Here: © AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Here: © Greg Gorman

Here: © KMazur / WireImage
Here: © Mario Testino, David Furnish and Elton John, Paris, 1997
Here: photograph by Charles Green
sre: © David Furnish
fere: © David Furnish
fere: © David Furnish
lere: © David Furnish
lere: © David Furnish
lere: © Sam Taylor-Johnson
Sam Taylor-Johnson
Here: © Johnnie Shand Kydd
re: © Matthew Baron
( James Turano
Here: photograph by Greg Gorman © HST Global (courtesy of Rocket Entertainment)

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about the author

Sir Elton John’s career achievements to date are unsurpassed. He is one of
the top-selling solo artists of all time, with twenty-six gold and thirty-eight
platinum or multi-platinum albums, and one diamond album. Elton’s many
awards and honours include six Grammys, thirteen Ivor Novellos and a BRIT
Award. In 2018 he was named the most successful male solo artist in the
Billboard Hot 100 chart history. In 1992 he founded the Elton John AIDS
Foundation, which has raised over $450 million in the global fight against
HIV/AIDS. He is married to David Furnish, and they have two sons. You can
sign up for email updates here.

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contents

Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication

Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Ox
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Epilogue

Photographs

Acknowledgements
Index
Picture Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright

Henry Holt and Company
Publishers since 1866

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www.henryholt.com

Henry Holt® and : are registered trademarks of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

Copyright © 2019 by HST Global Limited
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Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Book Distribution Limited

ISBN: 9781250147608

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First US Edition 2019
Published in the UK by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd

Quad/F
eISBN 9781250147615

First eBook edition: September 2019